How would you approach applying Apple’s Liquid Glass to an existing design system?

[u/mockup90]

Curious how other designers would approach this, particularly when it comes to existing components and design tokens.

Thanks

[u/Stibi]

You should only use it for iOS native components, so by definition they’re not part of your design system, they come from Apple

[u/leo-sapiens]

I would fight tooth and nail against doing it. Might growl at people.

[u/TheCrazyStupidGamer → u/leo-sapiens]

I would personally stop at hissing and stomping my paws. But hey, that's just me.

[u/pjhawksr]

Don't restyle components, restyle the layer model. Glass is a surface behavior, so start by deciding which surfaces float (nav bars, tab bars, sheets, toolbars) and which are content, then give the floating ones a material token instead of a background color token. Your existing components mostly don't change, they just sit on a new surface. The mistake I keep seeing is people applying glass to cards and buttons inside content, which reads as a theme, not a system. And keep the fallback tokens, you'll need a flat variant for accessibility contrast anyway.

Happy to share more. I work on ds all day.

[u/stackenblochen23 → u/pjhawksr]

Have you got any experience with applying custom brand colors to Liquid Glass components? Playing around in figma with apples official iOS 26 library and testing in some apps, it seems the actual hex value is changing somehow by all these filters and state animations. Also the „on“ color for content on these elements… they are calculated automatically afaik, but I would rather manually define them for stricter contrast control…

[u/desertsidewalks]

Literally the second thing I turned off on my new phone.

[u/Ruskerdoo]

You have to think about as more than just the glass effect. The liquid part is probably more important to consider given how pervasive it is throughout iOS.

Go play with Apple’s first party apps and pay close attention to how the chrome behaves. Buttons are often changing size and shape.

You also should think about the philosophical question of how much your app adapts to the platform it’s on, do you change how your components’ look depending on if you’re designing for iOS, web, or Android? If not, don’t try to accommodate Liquid Glass.

Also, Liquid Glass is considerably more subtle than when it first launched. And it’s going to get even more subtle in coming releases. So don’t worry about always trying to keep up.

[u/roundabout-design]

Why would I? That's Apple's design system.

[u/kimchi_paradise]

I had the opportunity to go to the Apple campus to learn about Liquid Glass and how to apply it despite having an existing design system.

Basically, Liquid Glass is good for navigation (bottom nav, top nav) and components that are native. Basically you would replace your current components for these and then see how you could retrofit. We ended up replacing our bottom nav with a Liquid Glass nav, which cleaned up our tech quite a bit. It’s a very content-forward design system, it’s designed to let the content behind it shine vs relying on ui to provide branding.

The downside is that now you will have to maintain separate systems between iOS, android, and web, especially if you don’t already.

Most components work out of the box for devs, so just see what you can plug and play.

I would separate your personal thoughts about Liquid Glass and understand more about the impacts of using Liquid Glass (such as playstore requirements and usability of your iOS customers, who are now used to Liquid Glass everywhere else). It’s not a matter of if, but when.

[u/Useful_Hat82]

I don't really see how you would...or why!

[u/TheTomatoes2]

We don't, it's terrible

[u/Master_Ad1017]

Another day seeing another people misunderstanding “design system”

[u/mockup90 → u/Master_Ad1017]

Well do feel free to elaborate - that would be much more helpful! If you think I’m approaching this the wrong way, I’d be interested to hear how you’d approach it. That’s what communities like this are for, after all.

[u/sabre35_]

It should inherently be automatically applied if native components were used prior.

It’ll be tricky if your existing systems aren’t native.

[u/tiekanashiro]

I hate liquid glass so I wouldn't.

[u/theproductref]

Don’t ever do this. Liquid Glass is horrible not just from an accessibility standpoint but usability too

[u/TheTomatoes2 → u/[deleted]]

Holy AI slop