Liquid Marmite

Some people seem to love Liquid Glass. Others hate it.

It’s a bold aesthetic choice. It’s flashy. It adds a layer of “look at this” to the UI. It certainly gives the devices a unique and consistent Apple OS identity.

While the designers at Apple say it’s all about putting content front and centre, it actually distracts from the content with its appearance. The glass effect “curves” and distorts the content underneath it. And the contrast and readability issues have been discussed repeatedly over the summer. See these screenshots of beta 4, when Apple walked back some legibility improvements in favour of more transparency, for example.

As another, small, example (which is just a design issue, with no accessibility issues) see the GIF in this Mastodon post. It’s so distracting, getting in the way of the actual content.

Compare to Material Design Expressive on Android. It’s fun. It’s got personality. It’s fluid. But it’s not the central character in the UI. It doesn’t have a negative effect on the UI, making it harder to use or getting in the way.

The UI of the most popular operating systems can be fun, but it should be simple, uncontroversial, unnoticeable. It should be butter, not marmite.

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