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Cool concept, just please never ever do this in anything production, it's bad enough we've now got a mainline OS with such awful legibility.

by esskay 1y ago

tempodox 1y ago
Making everything illegible is necessary, so they can sell you a legible design as the next big revolution. Just not in one step. The return to legibility will be a multi part story with cliffhangers, betrayals and everything else it takes to keep you hooked and Apple in the news.
- brookst 1y ago
  The world isn’t that conspiratorial. The designers on Liquid Glass are proud of it, and also disappointed that some of the design system did not make it into v1.0 code, so the reality is less legible than the designs indicated. There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way.
  - saurik 1y ago
    Maybe legibility should be a ship condition on the first version of the code, not some final destination to eventually achieve. Or like, maybe they need to actually say that, when they claim this is the culmination of years of thought and effort, and that this is clearly the most amazing design ever, that they don't mean the thing they are actually pointing at.
  - DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
    > There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way. New Coke / Coke Classic Windows Vista / Windows 7 Office 2007 / Office 2010
    - timeon 1y ago
      > Windows Vista / Windows 7 It was same ugly design. But bug fixes are natural for later versions.
    - brookst 1y ago
      You honestly think the people working on those did a bad job intentionally, and the companies took big PR and revenue hits intentionally, just so they could save the day years later?
Aerbil313 1y ago
I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design. After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design. Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app. To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today. The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements. But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content? Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.
- esskay 1y ago
  I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things). But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.
  - audunw 1y ago
    It’s weird to complain about accessibility in macOS when it has such a huge amount of easily discoverable accessibility settings to handle just about every need… including the option to turn off liquid glass effect!

Cool concept, just please never ever do this in anything production, it's bad enough we've now got a mainline OS with such awful legibility.

by esskay 1y ago

Cool concept, just please never ever do this in anything production, it's bad enough we've now got a mainline OS with such awful legibility.

tempodox 1y ago

Making everything illegible is necessary, so they can sell you a legible design as the next big revolution. Just not in one step. The return to legibility will be a multi part story with cliffhangers, betrayals and everything else it takes to keep you hooked and Apple in the news.

brookst 1y ago
The world isn’t that conspiratorial. The designers on Liquid Glass are proud of it, and also disappointed that some of the design system did not make it into v1.0 code, so the reality is less legible than the designs indicated. There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way.
- saurik 1y ago
  Maybe legibility should be a ship condition on the first version of the code, not some final destination to eventually achieve. Or like, maybe they need to actually say that, when they claim this is the culmination of years of thought and effort, and that this is clearly the most amazing design ever, that they don't mean the thing they are actually pointing at.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago
  > There is no designer in the world making bad designs as part of some conspiracy to enable their employer to launch improved designs several years later. There’s no company that operates that way. New Coke / Coke Classic Windows Vista / Windows 7 Office 2007 / Office 2010
  - timeon 1y ago
    > Windows Vista / Windows 7 It was same ugly design. But bug fixes are natural for later versions.
  - brookst 1y ago
    You honestly think the people working on those did a bad job intentionally, and the companies took big PR and revenue hits intentionally, just so they could save the day years later?

Aerbil313 1y ago

I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design. After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design. Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app. To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today. The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements. But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content? Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.

esskay 1y ago
I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things). But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.
- audunw 1y ago
  It’s weird to complain about accessibility in macOS when it has such a huge amount of easily discoverable accessibility settings to handle just about every need… including the option to turn off liquid glass effect!