Apple UI
A quarter century of one company restating what a screen is made of, where the metaphor moves from water to metal to glass while the underlying instinct holds steady.
Dictionary entry
- Liquid Glass 2025– / Style
Unifies the floating control and navigation layer as a fluid glass material that refracts and adapts to the content beneath.
- Aqua 2000–2014 / Style
Mac OS X's design language of buttons you want to lick. Jelly gloss, pinstripes, deep shadows and the genie effect staged digital components as objects you could touch, and set the terms for UI throughout the 2000s. What the web made of it with images is Web 2.0 Gloss.
- Brushed Metal 1999–2007 / Style
The hairline-metal windows of iTunes and Safari: a skeuomorphic branch that speaks an app's purpose through material, bringing pro-gear trust to the desktop.
- Platinum 1997–2001 / Style
Apple's own name for the default appearance of Mac OS 8, shipped alongside the Appearance Manager, a framework built so the entire look could later be swapped for another. It drains the color out of the interface and works in grays alone, embossing whatever can be pressed and flattening whatever cannot until it merges with the background. The newly thickened window frame was a signal that the window could now be dragged by any edge.
- Apple Desktop Interface 1984–1997 / Style
This is the design language Apple named itself, in the 1987 guidelines book whose subtitle reads The Apple Desktop Interface. Working with one bit of black and white, it wrote down a house style: halftone dot patterns standing in for gray, rounded window corners, a title bar of stacked horizontal rules, and a heavy bitmap face.
- visionOS Spatial Design 2023– / Style
The screen language Apple set out for Vision Pro in its Human Interface Guidelines. A window is an upright plane whose background is a material Apple calls glass, so the room shows through it while specular reflections and shadows report where the plane sits and how big it is. visionOS defines a point as an angle rather than a count of pixels, which keeps a window's apparent size constant as it moves away.