December 20, 2025
Liquid glass grinds my gears
Everyone else has had their say about the Liquid Glass design adopted by Apple, so why shouldn’t I? Actually, I’m mostly fine with it, but some of those icons just don’t make sense.
The one that jumps out at me is Settings. The icon is a set of gears — glass gears apparently. I can’t help thinking about the teeth breaking off as they mesh together. Ouch.
The same goes for the Passwords icon — a set of three glass keys. Try putting one of those in a lock and see how well it holds up. Hint: it won’t.
Both of those should be metal, but that would put them out of step with the rest of the icons. It’s almost like we should go back to the original skeuomorphic design where the icons looked the way they would in real life.
Another example is the Books icon. Can you imagine a book made out of glass? Those pages won’t turn. The same goes for Contacts, which I’m pretty sure is supposed to represent a book of sorts. Both of these icons should be paper.
The old Mail icon looks like a paper envelope, just as you would expect. The new one looks like a glass envelope, which, of course, would break if you tried to read the contents.
One more that makes me cringe is the Games icon represented by a glass rocket propelled with glass fire. That thing would never get off the ground. We need metal and fire.
The only one that kind of makes sense is the Camera icon, with its glass lens. But the ring around the lens and the body of the camera are presumably also made of glass, so it only half-way makes sense.
I do manage to suffer these indignities, though, by thinking of the icons as baubles. For example, don't think of it as a real book. It’s more like a decoration that you might hang from a Christmas tree. What about the rest of the year? Some people have whole shelves devoted to knickknacks and doodads, so you could think of your glass keys sitting on one of those.