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Holden Page · Jun 11, 2025

It's giving Millennial Gray

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Holden Page · Holden Page

Hey folks,

WWDC didn’t shock. New OS numbers? Check. “Apple Intelligence”? Sure. And at the center of it all: Liquid Glass.

It’s pretty. It’s polished. And it’s personality-free.

While the design community is bringing back skeuomorphism, Liquid Glass evades the nostalgia. Instead, it’s sanding everything down to work everywhere.

And that’s the real story: Apple is designing not for a device, but for every device — simultaneously. That requires restraint. If the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro are going to blend into a single, cooperative ecosystem, then the UI has to fade into the background. Personality becomes a liability when you’re chasing seamlessness.

By contrast, Android gets to peacock. Google doesn’t worry about how Material looks on Windows, because it doesn’t have to. Parity is a lost cause — so why not get weird?

But that freedom has a price. Cross-device copy and paste? You’re duct-taping apps and praying for reliability. Apple, for all its quirks, owns the full stack.

Liquid Glass, like Millennial Grey before it, isn’t exciting. But it’s safe. It’s scalable. It syncs.

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Stay lovely,

Holden

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