Dieter Rams' Ten Principles: Liquid Glass

by nntwozz on 10/1/2025, 1:15 AM with 2 comments

1 Good design is innovative

We added glassy effects because we were bored with flat design.

2 Good design makes a product useful

We decreased legibility so that you can enjoy the blurred backgrounds instead.

3 Good design is aesthetic

We made it look elegant half of the time, the other half we made it look rushed and unfinished.

4 Good design makes a product understandable

You don't need to understand, you just need to squint.

5 Good design is unobtrusive

Look, if you don't like it you can just turn it off… kinda.

6 Good design is honest

Nothing says honest like 100% transparency, right?

7 Good design is long-lasting

Yeah, well… remember Marble (Snow Leopard)? Those were the days…

8 Good design is thorough down to the last detail

We made the toggle switch longer, that is something only Apple can do.

9 Good design is environmentally-friendly

Tim said not to tell mother Nature about the extra power draw of all the extra effects!

10 Good design is as little design as possible

Well we kinda fudged this one, but hey 9 out of 10 ain't bad!?

  • by al_borland on 10/1/2025, 4:34 AM

    This is a very biased take.

    5, for example. Good design is unobtrusive.

    As I was reading the post iOS 26, the address bar shrunk down to a tiny little pill and the entire screen was the content of the page. The browser chrome got out of the way. It was unobtrusive.

    Or 8, Good design is thorough down to the last detail.

    Is it perfect on its first release, no. Will it ever be perfect, probably not. But they did tackle pretty much everything, across every OS they have (6 of them?) all at once. How long did it take Microsoft to transition the Control Panel to Settings in Windows? They started in 2012 and still aren’t done.

    I could go on, but you get the point. These are uncharitable cheap shots.

  • by PaulHoule on 10/1/2025, 1:44 AM

    Honestly, I don't care about most of those things. What I care about is that it just looks like crap. There are a lot of things that don't look transparent. They just look kinda sorta half grayed out in a half baked way. I mean now in my iphone it looks like the numbers on the clock were run through some kind of anti anti aliasing system. It just looks like it was done by a bunch of amateurs.