Kaari wraps it up: ​”I believe design comes in many flavors. It’s influenced by the person, the domain, the market, the customers. In consumer products, you might need to test ideas quickly because motivations are hard to predict. In B2B or enterprise, you often have more context and can design from that. Some industries require extreme reliability and clarity. The environment matters too. Stakeholders, clients, company culture, and your skills as a designer. If you’re more visual, you lead with visuals. If you’re strong in code, you might use it earlier. […] I want to elevate this discussion above tools, and make sure tools don’t take over the future of design. I don’t want us to needlessly devalue conceptual and divergent thinking just because new tools make execution easier.”

“Our industry is not very patient, and once you start building designs directly to production as the default, the culture and organizational reasons to consider problems, concepts, and intentions start evaporating. We start devaluing the why behind our designs in favor of output.
My worry isn’t the code or the tools themselves. It’s a decline in consideration, and with that, a decline in unique, well-designed products. The question is how we keep that alive even as new tools and technologies emerge.”

Kaari replies: ​“The ​“make your own things” from generic blocks idea is warm one, and I do appreciate it. Where it starts to lose me is when it tries to force a reality that doesn’t really exist, and it’s not what people do or look for. Look at any craft. The kitchen. The workshop. Purpose-built spaces filled with purpose-built tools, often shaped by centuries of tradition (also sometimes known as experience). Serious craftspeople don’t operate in primitives. A chef doesn’t stock ​“a knife”, ​“a pot”, ​“a carrot”. They have a specific knife, a specific size, a tradition they trust.”

Kaari clarifies his thoughts in an article: ​“I tend to think about design as a search, not a production pipeline. You start with a messy problem. Early on, you do not know the answer. This is why I never fully buy the idea that design is about output. I agree that design is useless without shipping, but the process of designing is not. The design process, and the suffering part of that process, are valuable. […] Use whatever tools you want, but be deliberate about what mode you are in. Protect exploration from premature constraint. Invite constraints when you are ready to learn from them. Use code as feedback, not as a cage.”

On constraints: ​“If you let constraints define the space too early, you do not just get a worse outcome. You lose outcomes that never get discovered.”

On unification: ​“The dream of a coherent universe is compelling. A world where ideas move from chaos to clarity without translation loss. Where designers can build and builders can design. I see the desire, and it can be good. But unification has a shadow side. It can turn into standardization. If everything is built from the same primitives, you get the same patterns repeated across teams. Tools raise the floor, but they can also lower the ceiling if they quietly define what is worth attempting. If the easiest path is always the most conventional path, convention becomes the product.”

Karri Saarinen reacts to the announcement of a visual editor in Cursor: ​“Whenever a designer becomes more of a builder, some idealism and creativity dies. Not because building is bad, but because you start out including constraints earlier in the process than they should. […] People forget that the creative process is not about tools. It’s about forming a vision, and then translating that vision into some form.”

A lot was written last week about Alan Dye’s departure from Apple as VP of Human Interface Design to lead design at Meta as Chief Design Officer. I shared a few critical pieces about Liquid Glass in the last few months, and thought this story from John Gruber was quite telling: ​“After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, ​“I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ​‘radio buttons’ and ​‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like ​“programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership.”

I shared some of my thoughts on Liquid Glass in issue #229, so it was refreshing to see how Linear approached the new design language. Couldn’t agree with this more: ​“The one effect we chose not to reproduce was Liquid Glass’s refraction. Technically, it requires access to pixel-level data that isn’t available to third-party developers. Aesthetically, it also wasn’t the right choice because refraction can make dense professional interfaces harder to read. By relying on precise blurs, masking, and lighting, we maintained a sense of depth without losing clarity.”

Raluca Budiu from Nielsen Norman Group with a sobering critique of Apple’s new visual language: ​“iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design. Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability.”

On transparency: ​“One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds.”

On animations: ​“Our eyes are finely tuned to detect motion, which is why animated buttons grab attention instantly. But delight turns into distraction on the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time. […] It’s like the interface is shouting ​“look at me” when it should quietly step aside and let the real star — the content — take the spotlight. […] Motion for motion’s sake is not usability. It’s distraction with a side of nausea.”

I was looking forward to this update since WWDC, but it left me increasingly annoyed and disappointed. From hidden actions in Safari to blurred content with jittery transitions in Mail, everyday experiences require more attention and extra steps on my part without giving anything in return. Liquid Glass feels like an ultimate departure from Steve Jobs’ ​“design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works” motto.

Max Stoiber notes how traditional design handoffs are a thing of the past at Shopify. Agree with this: ​“the hard part of making prototypes real is not ​“turning static drawings in Figma into HTML & CSS” anymore. AI can do that perfectly in seconds. What’s left is: backend implementations, wiring up the data fetching, handling state… None of which is ​“handoff.”

For most of my career, I owned both design and front-end code on products I worked on. This combination of skills used to be a (somewhat) rare differentiator, but became ubiquitous with AI. That said, for AI to work ​“perfectly in seconds” requires an extensive setup with an advanced design system shared between Figma and code. Without this foundation, prototyping designs for real apps still requires some technical knowledge. These days, I often use Figma Make for quick experiments and proofs of concepts before switching to the actual codebase and prototyping the final version with Cursor (fully adopted by the design team at Shopify as well).

“We’ve added three new Apple UI kits, watchOS, macOS, and visionOS, to help you design across even more surfaces. The kits are off by default, giving you the flexibility to switch them on only when you need them.”

A nice roundup of icon sets designed in the new liquid glass style.

The most recent update to Adobe Illustrator broke copying vectors to paste into Figma. Rogie shows how to fix this.

My sympathy goes out to web developers looking for Glass’s CSS in Dev Mode.

Apple released new iOS and iPad OS 26 design kits last week. They’ve been clearly waiting for Figma to add the new Glass effect first, as reproducing it manually would not have been sustainable. This is a core UI library if you’re designing for iOS, but also a fantastic educational resource for everyone else.

Figma’s newest product designer Rogie presents a new effect that allows you to manipulate light, depth, frost, and refraction to create dynamic elements that refract light like physical glass. This playground file will teach you how to use the effect and provide creative inspiration to have fun with glass. 

This effect looks incredible! So glad we won’t need to deal with hacky imitations. Don’t miss a breakdown of how Miggi made this video.

Hardik Pandya with a thoughtful critique: ​“When Apple places interface elements behind a glassy refractive layer and claims this brings content closer, it contradicts our lived experience with glass as a material. The iPhone’s most powerful feature has always been direct manipulation — the sense that you are touching your photos, sliding your messages, and tapping your apps directly. There is no separation layer. There is no glass between you and your content, because the screen itself disappears during interaction.”

“Inspired by the Apple iPhone 16e launch event visuals, create stunning liquid metal effects for any shape, text, or logo. Instantly transform designs into sleek, shiny metallic visuals—static or animated—for a futuristic, high-end look. Use generated code in your Framer or Webflow project.”

Joey Banks recreated Apple’s new iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 button styles using Figma, complete with their new Liquid Glass material. These buttons are fully editable and use native Figma effects.

Nice glass buttons by Oğuz Yağız Kara.

Mike Bespalov imitated the effect using an SVG Displacement filter, without any JS or WebGL. Unfortunately, it only works in Chrome and isn’t easily adaptable to other shapes.