iOS 15 is here and there are some pretty interesting UI changes in the OS. The biggest visual difference on the home screen are the brand new Weather and Maps icons. The general style is going towards more cartoonish style, with a glassmorphic cloud on the weather icon, and bold, strong colors on the Maps.

The new Maps icon also shows a strong focus on the directions feature - both for driving and other modes of transport.

The Weather and Maps apps have been refreshed as well, with the former getting beautiful animations and an overall more friendly vibe even when showing more information than before. Maps are now focused on clarity of information a lot more, with some color choices that may need some getting used to.

The biggest revolution by far has come to Safari. The address bar is now at the bottom, closer to the keyboard, and you can swipe on it to go between tabs. This is truly awkward at first - after so many years - but I do see how it can actually be an easier / better way. 

I also like the fact that Apple is not afraid of making a bold move like that - it's testing something that's a big departure of what we're used to. It's definitely a way to push the UI's of the future forward - especially with so many people being "forced" to use it. It may lead to some interesting discoveries on how we use the web.

On another hand, they also reverted back the uncomfortable in-field time-pickers. That experiment didn't work, so it's good to see a familiar, larger picker replace it. That experience, even in a small popup like this is still a lot more friendly and straightforward than scrolling inside a small text field. 

What do you think about these updates? The changes in most cases are very subtle, as it's more of an iterative update, but I find it fascinating to see the process of introducing something more revolutionary (Safari) and also taking informed decisions to bring back a pattern that worked better. Who knows, maybe iOS 16 will move back Safari address bar back to the top. But at least they tried something new.

iOS 15 UI Design changes

iOS 15 UI design changes

in user interfaces we were often facing a brick wall of client’s indifference.

But who doesn’t want to have a perfect product? Why?

The recent years have been a “craft” revolution.

Beer, food, furniture, even ice cream — they’re all “craft” now.

Why aren’t designs “craft” in so many cases and why their owners don’t care?

explanations simply bounce off their cognitive dissonances and they reorder what they think to tame it. Processing all that information is hard, so it’s a lot easier to dismiss it as long as the product “works” and “sells”.

tangible. Something they can understand right away. It’s a shape. It has a color. It’s like a lego brick making lanes in their imagination highway.

grid-setting method I devised to break through that wall of

has long been about making products work better for humans.

which in turn through clarity, readability and aesthetics builds trust.

as a field was made without thinking about all of it’s users.

To bump up the rates and make us designers feel special, we devised a code of sorts — which we use to mask simple to understand truths. We communicate with jargon daily, and most of the time our ego likes it when the client listens in bewilderment assuming we’re doing “science and stuff”.

In many cases of course we are. After all UX is science. In other cases we use

It has a nice ring to it when talking to a client. His puzzled face bumps up our egos a bit. 🤔 But it’s better to say “things we already know”. This is both a red flag and a red square all rolled into one.

Of course it doesn’t have to go over the top in the other direction either.

No worries, you can use some fancy lingo here and there. Just don’t overuse them.

Let the results (of research or of your successful redesign) speak volumes about your work quality. Not fancy words.

Your clients are the users of your UX process. Make their user experience good.

allow us to make pretty good UX for most products, the neglected little brother called UI will be the focus here. But if needed we can expand the red square methodology towards “softer” ux fields than actual designing — no worries. Also I believe in research and “proper” UX methods. I just don’t think we need to apply them to EVERY possible design, as a lot of the projects differentiate in style or business model — not design per se.

There are of course better, more professional ways to do layout (including the golden ratio) but nothing beats adding a bunch of red squares to an existing design and showing random spacings.

The image above is better (and faster) understood than grid lines or box models. That’s mainly because of two reasons:

But red square method is more than just a simple grid

It started as a way to show grids, but transformed into a general simplification of most of the communications. “Things we know” may not sound as fancy as

but we’re beyond the age of showing off (that was 2009–2011) our UX prowess.

and talk about it in a way people understand.

Otherwise they simply won’t be interested.

We have used the Red Square Method in most of our beginner-facing projects, because for junior designers this technique is the fastest and easiest to grasp. The main goal of layouts should be to show hierarchy of elements. That leads to faster processing and better understanding of what the user is looking at. 

You can watch this special, hidden video on it for even more detail. 

We also explore this method in practice in the first part of our 

The Red Square Method in UI Design

The Red Square method in UI Design

As designers, we appreciate great products. Designs that wow us with their experience, but also have that emotional connection of something beautiful and polished down to the smallest of details.

We smile at success stories of hard work, thorough research, beautiful UI, and perfect execution.

But we ignore one important part of the story. Most of those great designs are pretty modern, consumer-facing products that were created after UX became a thing. The visuals progressed the most in the last 15 years.

g on horrible, outdated, clunky user interfaces. Many of them coming from a time before anyone would consider User Experience a factor.

These apps run our railway scheduling, airplanes and airports, banking and financial system, sewage treatment plants, your insurance company, power plants, and more.

So while it may be fun to order a pizza with just three taps on a beautiful, ergonomic UI, the truly important things are very far from that ideal. They require a lot of time to learn, are often impossible to master and leave a lot of possibilities for errors — sometimes with grave consequences.

Before we get to the UI’s, let’s quickly look at the technology running a lot of these apps first.

Have you heard of Cobol? It’s a programming language created in 1959 that is used by most of the big businesses and governments to this day.

It is so rare and old-school in many ways, that there are jokes like:

And while apparently Cobol wasn’t all bad (according to some developers tombstone inscriptions), it’s a relic from the past just like those clunky UI’s of the ’80s and ’90s.

Yet they continue to run our lives in the most crucial aspects of them.

Y2K was short for Year 2000 and caused widespread panic because of the upcoming date change. The whole reason for that panic was coming from the fact, that developers used just six digits to represent a date instead of eight.

So 99 was simply 1999, but 01 was interpreted as 1901. The year 2000 would then be the same as 1900.

That could cause a lot of potential problems for most industries running these legacy systems.

Many companies frantically worked on a fix in the late 90’s, while the media painted scenarios of airplanes falling from the sky and powerplants exploding.

Before the UX revolution, the idea of an easy-to-use interface in a “Pro” app was laughed at. After all, if someone’s a “Pro”, they surely can learn how to operate the heavy machinery of a hard to grasp, 500 field form with many conflicting labels.

An old Windows XP meme, but in reality many error messages were just as helpful.

An old mentor would sit down with aspiring “Software operators” and while stroking his long, white beard he’d guide them through the interface.

Clunky UI like that led to Citibank sending people $900M instead of $7.8M in interest payments. And that transaction was confirmed and done by three people.

There was no help and no guide, apart from things people remembered from onboarding meetings — often done twenty years prior.

Some large corporations still stick to this rule, as rebuilding their legacy system could cost Billions and can lead to a set of completely new problems.

But losing money like in the example above is a good motivator for change and there will be a rise in very large ground-up redesigns of all that important software coming in the next few years.

Let’s hope we, as designers, are ready for it, as the level of complexity is a bit higher than a scooter rental app, and the consequences of errors are a lot more significant.

I personally worked on two products like that (in fintech and banking), and I believe they require a completely different mindset and a profound level of understanding before any “design happens”.

It probably is not going to be as simple as that.

So while we may feel that the UX industry has reached its peak in 2009–2012, it may actually have a revival soon.

While those simple products we’re mostly working on right now can often be a mix of heuristics and a nice UI on top, these legacy apps are on a whole other level of complexity.

If you’re a problem solver, you should be excited! There will be a plethora of problems to solve soon, with very high stakes and an immense level of responsibility.

The world is running on bad UI

After we went through all the very basics of UI design based on

free chapters it’s time to start moving those rectangles!

When you’re just starting out, it’s good to do the “project init” screens from scratch. That will give you the practice and confidence you’ll need at this point. After a while, however, you can build your own starting templates to make the process even faster.

ou’re just starting out and/or building your portfolio, it’s best to work on mobile apps first. That’s simply because due to the smaller canvas, it’s actually easier and faster to come up with something good. Making a website — and especially a landing page — requires more skill, due to the fact that the screen is larger, so you need to figure out a complex structure of content vs (often large) whitespace.

This can get tricky. So let’s start with apps, shall we?

First thing to do, is deciding on the device your design will “live on”. Again, if you’re aiming to build out a UI portfolio first, it’s likely up to you, whether you’ll use an iPhone or and Android as reference.

If you want a truly unique, engaging showcase of your work, you shouldn’t really use Material Design or iOS components all too much anyway. They make the project look generic, and in the fast-paced modern world people will simply scroll right through them without pause.

If you’re working on your portfolio, avoid using generic styles, and try to make it interesting. Design by

Android and iOS, although very different as platforms, are constantly moving closer to one another in terms of UI norms. There are some things that should likely still be platform-specific (like textfields in forms), but most of the design can be made platform-agnostic.

So if you’re a daily Android user, design for Android. Try to pick a phone with a 16:9 or taller aspect ratio. If you’re in the Apple camp, go ahead and start with the regular iPhone Pro (not Max).

For this exercise, I’m going to pick the iPhone. The first thing to do, is adding an Artboard by pressing A on the keyboard. Find the right device on the list and select it.

The next thing is to add a status bar — you can do it from the build-in iOS library in Sketch. Figma also has a similar option.

Then make a guide at the bottom of your status-bar and hide it. In showcase, portfolio designs they can be an unnecessary visual clutter, so they’re often not shown. But the guide is there so you know which line not to cross.

Navbar, or Android’s Action bar, is the title bar just under the status bar. It can have a couple of different heights, and you can check the proper one in the guidelines. They do change every now and then, so here’s a different idea, that will help you get the right height instinctively.

Go to your phone and find an app that has the navbar and background separated. It just has to show the division. Most of the built-in Apple apps are a good pick here. I picked one of the Settings screens. Then take a screenshot and send it to your computer.

Drop that screenshot onto your artboard, set another guide where the navbar ends, and then remove it. Now you know how high it should be, based on a real, visual product. That will make it easier to remember and recall than remembering a number that changes every few years. It will also give you a lot more context of how things fit on the navbar, than simply entering some number into a box.

Grids can be scary. Coming up with the right one, and then sticking to it is something that doesn’t come easily. So instead of spending a lot of time on drawing grid-lines, make a soft-grid starting with setting the side-margins. These are “lines you do not cross”. They’re also something most designers don’t pay too much attention to.

Often, when I audit the designs you guys send me, the left and right margins are different, sometimes by just 1 or 2 points. That shifts your entire design optically to one side and has a negative impact on readability. That’s why I believe it’s a good place to start.

The main two soft-grids right now are an 8-multiple and a 10-multiple. I prefer the former, but you can use the 10 if it’s easier to calculate. It means that 8 and 10 respectively, are usually the smallest margins your content can have. Then 16 and 20 are one step higher, with 24 and 30 being the next set of values.

Design needs to breathe, so for most mobile projects I set the margins at either 24 or 32 points. For dense projects with a lot of data in column views, it’s best to go with 24, and for simpler, less condensed screens use 32.

Then use that number and smaller numbers to set up the right hierarchy in your design.

If you have a rough idea of what you’re trying to design in mind, you can start by blockframing it. It’s a useful technique of working with “bounding-boxes” instead of content. Just make sure they’re all properly aligned.

For example, if you wanted to recreate a popular photo-sharing app it would look something like this:

Blockframes are a good way to understanding the rigid rules behind a good design. It’s not all random artwork, as

Rule of Proximity is essential here. The closer the objects are, the more they are perceived as a group that belongs together. When designing a card layout, obviously the content inside the card will be closer together, than the cards themselves.

Once you have the blockframe complete, you can group it and lock it with reduced opacity (10% will be enough).

Then start adding the real content but fitting it within those strict guidelines. After you’re done with this part, simply hide the blockframe group and you’re all set to share it with the world.

After a while, build your “init-templates” that include a navbar/actionbar rectangle and pre-made grid-guides. But at the beginning of this journey it’s good to do them by hand to get the feel for how they work.

Mobile app UI Design basics: How to start

UI Design basics: How to start

It has become cliché in the 90's crime TV shows to have someone looking through a pixellated camera feed, point at something and say "enhance this". Back then it was laughable, as we all knew there wasn't really any extra data in those pixels to enhance from.

Besides, if there was a higher quality or resolution, why show the pixellated version in the first place? 

When I started working as a designer in the early 2000's, the highest, popular resolution for design was 1024x768, so naturally everything was a bit pixellated. We didn't need high resolution photos, because there were no screens to benefit from them at the time.

Growing up on old Atari games, the jump in fidelity was hard to miss. It felt as great as tech will go back at the time. 

The jump from Pitfall (pictured above) where the graphics was actually created using individual pixels (in code), to the next revolution was quite a long one. The video-game graphics were improving gradually, but they were still stacks of pixels. Until one game redefined the genre and arrived on 67 "save icons" (or diskettes as some used to call them). 

Mad Dog McCree was the first fully photorealistic video game. It required 67 disks to install (before the CDROM era) and as you can see the graphics were quite pixellated even for that time due to the heavy compression. 

When the internet finally became widely accepted, photos started appearing on websites as well. The resolutions were getting better, and so were the screens.

The revolution came with high-density displays, where one point could consist of many individual pixels for an even sharper look. Everything was crisp again! 

A while ago Google search algorithm has changed into favoring page load speed. While on paper it seems logical - we want the web to load faster - it led to a dramatic pixellisation of the photos everywhere. 

To meet those high Lighthouse speed standards, developers crushed the PNG's, or used the super-lossy WEBP format. It loaded faster but looked like 💩. Take a look at most photos online - even in some respected publications. They're surprisingly low quality compared to what your display can do. Ever wondered why? 

Now Google has unveiled a much better AI tool, that upscales photos from pixellated to sharp. Yes - that's the "Computer: Enhance" function those silly TV-shows predicted will happen. They were right, and we were wrong. 

Judging by the photos it works great both on faces ...

While one obvious use-case is to bump up the resolution of our old digital photos to match the modern standards, the other one is actually a lot more interesting. 

If it can somehow be moved to "on-device" (or client-side) that AI could download the low-res images (think: progressive JPG style) and then upscale them on device. That would allow for the best of both worlds - faster loading times, a high lighthouse score AND good quality. 

We had to settle for less for way too long! 

Oh, and there's already an option like this for upscaling your video-calls. There are some cases where AI is not that scary and can truly be beneficial after all!

Google broke the internet photos and then fixed them

On their recent AI day, Tesla has unveiled a couple of things, but one that seemed the most controversial was a humanoid type robot. While the idea behind it was to elliminate physical labor (in the far future), I couldn't stop wondering what other implications this brings to the table. 

Before we get to the main question of this articles, it's important to mention that if (and that's still a big if) a shift like that happens, a lot of people will be out of work. One solution to that is of course the Universal Basic Income - a monthly paycheck from the government for people to support themselves. 

Of course the idea is that it's a pretty low, minimum value and if you want anything more out of life you'd still need to work. But I'm wondering for how many people spending 16 hours each day watching Netflix will be enough. That sounds scary.

On the other hand, having more time on their hands (i.e. being bored more often) can lead to a lot more artistic expression, which can be a refreshing thing - but it will also likely lead to a lot of bad artists. 

With the monetary problems out of the way, let's get to the main question:

To better handle this question let's divide design into two main categories. One would be the physical hand movement on a keyboard and a mouse and seeing a result on a screen in front of you. The other would be the critical thinking required to solve problems, but also creativity in the visual space. 

Technology is moving forward at an amazing pace. Just a few years ago the Boston Dynamics robots could barely walk, now they're doing backflips. 

The 3d way of seeing the world that Tesla's cars (and the bot) will supposedly have is enough to look at a flat screen in front of you and coordinate the hand movements on a predefined set of keys and a pointing device. 

So technically it's possible for designers and developers to move out of their almost comfortable chairs and move onto the couch full time. But there's one major flaw in this approach. 

If you have an AI capable of doing design, you don't need a physical robot to do it. Design is now mostly happening in a digital space, so you could just write some software to do that design for you. You don't need to sit down a robot to move a mouse and press the keys. It can all happen without that robot, on the same computer you use for your design today. It would make your laptop the designer.

Make a design button would then finally become reality! Sounds good? Well, a little too good! 

There were attempts at this before, and while technically feasible and armed with machine learning they all failed.

What humans are particularly great at is creativity. I'd define as a way of often unpredictable "remix" external data into our own version of it. Because nothing really comes out of an empty brain. We need stimuli from various sources and we get inspired - a lot. 

Learning design is in a way seeing what works and what doesn't, and then repeating that process over and over again. If you do it for years, you can become a senior product designer and get rich 🤣

Now, if that kind of training was possible, we would have a lot of Kung Fu fighters in the world, right? 

But jokes aside, technically we can feed the AI good and bad solutions to design problems, and it could probably be able to sketch out an information architecture flow that wouldn't be half bad. 

The issue with this approach is that while we do have good and bad practices, a truly great design innovation comes from stepping outside the boundaries sometimes. And a human overseeing an AI like that would grow too complacent to innovate either. 

Some forms of UX research could be performed by artificial intelligence and some of them are even done this way now. Heatmapping tools do things, that used to be done by people before. And this space will only improve in the future. 

Qualitative research will probably be left to humans for the longest, as most quantitative studies are often supplemented by machine learning already. 

While UI design is definitely not art, it does require some extra creativity to truly spark an emotional connection with the users. We can't solve all the products with a design system, as Material Design proved. That's why Google is trying to personalise it now with Material You. 

Because ultimately it's about You - the customer. The more generic the design, the less attached you are to it. It's not as easy to predict how soft the shadow should be, or how bright the gradient, because this is what our less logical, emotional side tells us to experiment with. 

That's why I believe that while some typical UX jobs could be replaced by AI (but not really a "bot"), UI will be one of the last ones to fall in that battle. It simply requires that human touch a lot more than building flows, or doing quantitative research. 

And if we try and let that AI loose on dribbble... well that would be a very bad idea 🤣

I made a video about AI taking our jobs a while ago that you can watch here:

Don't worry! In the near future AI will likely be solving completely different problems, and both the design and coding industries are too small to really need complex, pricy robots or GPU calculating farms to tackle. 

At some point a bigger push to replace parts of our process with AI will happen for sure, so we simply need to stay on top of the game and learn to use these tools for our gain, not fear them. 

And if we're talking Elon, I think Neuralink can actually be a much more feasible Designer enhancement at some point - as armed with that AND the human touch, we would be way better than any AI or bot. 

Can the Tesla Bot replace a designer?

Will the Tesla bot replace designers?

I have been already working as a designer for over 10 years when UX became mainstream. Of course, the internet didn't break because a typical UX process wasn't yet established.

There was a "before UX" time, when we delivered projects and they actually were successful. Want to guess how we did it? We researched what works, used competitive analysis, user surveys and then simply iterated until the results were good. 

In reality not much has really changed, the process got simply a little bit more defined, but next to that it also got a lot longer. 

I believe it had to start this way, because that scientific approach needed to be established, defined and outlined for the future. After a while, however, it led to mostly repeating the same patterns and a confusion in which roles are even needed / useful in the process. 

What UX brought to the table was a lot more research focus in smaller companies. Big businesses used research way before someone put the U and the X together. 

Some consultancy companies quickly realised there’s monetary potential here and started „inventing” narrow job titles just to add more (billed per hour) employees to a project. Workshops and other team activities became a great way to simply bill the end-client more for the work.

Sure, brainstorming sessions are a great way to ideate on new ideas, but what it transformed into was a litany of role-playing meetups, playing with action figures (representing users), sketching impossible to decipher „flows” on flipcharts and the ubiquitous post-its. 

Initially the clients were dumbfounded. They heard about how UX can greatly improve their businesses, so they assumed it simply has to work that way. They played along, paid over the top and - in many cases - seen an improvement. 

Companies started inventing even more roles, to fill the seats on a project with even more people, often contributing very little to the project and costing the client a lot more. 

UX happened at just the right time - with the introduction of the iPhone, there was a complete paradigm shift in how we interact with digital products. It heavily influenced the way they were designed as well, and helped justify the increased cost. After all, the mobile experience was still so fresh and new - we had to learn more about it. Plenty of room for improvement, so the UX process, alongside it’s many practitioners was welcomed with open arms. 

Years passed, apps matured, mobile devices got better. The industry did a lot of research and improved the experience in a significant way. That’s all great! Yay UX!

But one more thing started happening that not many people predicted. Mobile, by being so personal and hands on, was actually easier to use than the web. It opened the world of apps and mobile websites to a lot more users, who otherwise wouldn’t experience the digital world at all. 

That initial push into better user experience resulted in more and more people using those mobile products, but also understanding them. Users started to see the difference and notice when the experience is not that great. Over the years many users simply trained themselves to understand UX - even if subconsciously. 

The shift started happening, when the clients also learned the good practices and realised that the process is a little too large for most usecases. They started a little shy, by sometimes sketching very low fidelity wireframes - high level ones themselves. They used powerpoint at first, but when the design tool revolution kicked into full gear they switched to Figma, Axure and others. 

The similarity between Powerpoint drawing tools and dedicated design tools was so big (and still is), they quickly learned to create full, initial flows all by themselves. 

Knowing the product well and being invested in it personally led to a lot more engagement and focus than an external contractor could provide. 

The world stared moving towards the more agile approach, and customers simply preferred the slimmed-down process. First of all, it gave them the opportunity to truly participate and come up with ideas now. Previously they were mostly allowed to nod in unison when the UXers were speaking about the process. 

The wireframes most customers produce aren’t bad. We have found that out first hand when many of our clients started sketching the flows themselves. Sure - they often require some logical fixes or tweaks, but in many cases, they’re a great, fast start into the project. 

There’s a notion that UX researchers are necessary to even test if the product is viable for an user group. I believe this approach is wrong. Of course checking viability, or PMF (Product Market Fit) is essential, but it’s not the job of either UX researchers or designers. 

The viability should be tested by the product team, or a dedicated market research group within a larger organization. 

UX researchers can then analyze which of the existing IA (information architecture) to use for the product and plan a way to test how well the users perform the tasks. 

What I mean is that UX researchers should focus on the actual product, not the broader Human/Customer experience. If we dilute the role into doing all research in the company, it may lead to people who know how to research app usage, researching market trends. And with all due respect, this is simply inflating the UX research role, just so they have more to do. Rarely, they will be able to achieve the same result, that a trained market researcher from a product team would.

I believe we should have two, strongly overlapping roles. Researchers that know the design principles, and designers who know how research is conducted. 

No need to split it into separate sub-roles, unless you have a very large organization. The researchers should research, the designers should design. From the initial flow sketches all the way to the high-fidelity, polished UI designs. 

Sure, they can outsource illustrations to illustrators, just as market research should be outsourced to professionals in that field. 

But what that „design” part truly is, is moving some rectangles around. At first plain ones, then you add some shadows, gradients and a fancy font. 

Two roles that both understand the competences of the other side are crucial in the new landscape of companies having generally less money to spend. Most businesses need to go agile and strip away unnecessary parts of the design process to make it in the market. 

A designer who doesn’t design is not going to be an useful asset for most of the businesses this decade. And by design I don’t mean ideate on a flipchart. I mean truly design. 

Would you imagine Braun industrial designers in the 70’s being designers and never picking up a pencil? No. They’d be called managers, or marketers, but definitely not designers. 

Skill overlap is essential for quality work

And even if you have a larger design team, it’s good to have all designers understand both the flow parts of design, and the UI parts. That leads to better synnergy and a lot better result at the end. 

If everyone can deliver a polished project, there’s more potential to combine the best parts of each of them.

UI is not about „coloring a wireframe” anymore. With the popularity of Design Systems and clients doing simple wireframes themselves, and so many of the best IA practices already established, it’s the UI that makes a difference. 

2️⃣ Researchers should research (the actual product part, not the market viability).

Synnergy leads to better projects delivered with better budgets and more room for creativity and innovation. 🙌

Job titles and roles in UX are changing

Job titles and roles in UX

The main reason for coining the name glassmorphism was simple. The effect wasn't new (it dates back to almost 10 years ago), but each company called it something else. 

From acrylic, through frosted-glass to simply "glass effect". Without a common name designers could agree on, there would be difficulty exploring the use-cases, inspirations and examples.

Luckily the name caught on, and as of today there are over 3500 Dribbble shots using the tag, with Neumorphism at 5500. Keep in mind, that Neumorphism has been around (as a name) for over a year longer than Glassmorphism. 

As of today, there are at least four main ways to achieving a blurred, frosted-glass style background. You can:

Of course you can combine these effects together, even adding a couple of them at the same time. 

Another differentiator is using a border, which can be a transparent color (black or white) or a gradient (linear or radial). It can be thicker or thinner, depending on the look you want to achieve. 

And of course there are the different levels of blur you can go with, ranging from barely any blur, to super-blurred and everything in between.

When the trend started, it was clear (ha!) that most of the example of this trend featured white, "frosted" glass surfaces. Since then it has heavily evolved towards dark mode, often mixed with neon colors. I addressed it with a simple tutorial on how to create glassmorphic cards that you can watch here:

 Dark mode also allowed for more prominent radial-gradients, even on darker backgrounds, as it simply makes these glass cards look a lot better than their light counterparts. 

Some explorations led to color overlays on the otherwise monochromatic glass, which in turn led to even more variety in styling. 

Microsoft has premiered the preview of their next Windows OS, that relies heavily on Glassmorphism/Acrylic to show window hierarchy. The same effect has been used in Mac OS Big Sur for a while now too, and before that in Windows Vista, iOS 7 and many others. 

The current usage in both Mac OS and Windows, however, is a lot more refined, simpler and has better overall accessibility. 

I've said it many times before - a design trend is as accessible as you make it to be. That means that even Neumorphism can be accessible if you pick the right contrast for all the important elements and keep experimenting limited to decoration. 

As I predicted, Aurora UI style backgrounds are gaining in popularity and mixed with this style they give the right amount of freshness to the interfaces - at least for now. 

The simple, heavily blurred, intersecting ellipses seem to do the trick most of the time, but for the glass effect to really shine through, you also need some more opaque objects in the background.

Unlike Neumorphism, the glass effect will likely stay with us a little bit longer. It has more uses than most of the other recent styles, merges well with both light and dark modes, and can be used with good accessibility and contrast in mind. 

It's worth practicing glassmorphism UI's, but it's also important to understand that it works best when it's limited to one or two on-screen elements only. 

Adding the effect to everything on the screen can have the same negative effects Neumorphism had, and can lead to boring, over-designed projects. 

Keep it subtle, keep it simple and experiment!

iOS 15 UI Design changes

The Red Square Method in UI Design

The world is running on bad UI

Mobile app UI Design basics: How to start

Google broke the internet photos and then fixed them

Can the Tesla Bot replace a designer?

Job titles and roles in UX are changing

Glassmorphism in 2021

Twitter UI Redesign 2021 - First Impressions

A guide to the Modern Minimal UI style

Aurora UI — new visual trend for 2021

Glassmorphism in user interfaces

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