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Design Is Both Function and Form
Thoughts on Liquid Glass, Steve Jobs’s commencement speech gets enhanced, and how to future-proof your design career.
Roger Wong
June 15, 2025
The talk of the week was Apple’s debut of a new UI language called Liquid Glass. During the keynote for WWDC 2025, Apple talking heads led by Craig Federighi discussed at length about the new UI and its aesthetics. Indeed Liquid Glass looks cool. But soon the critics weighed in, with some calling it over the top, a rehash of Windows Vista, or an accessibility nightmare.
There are those of us in the community who are—shall I say—really passionate about accessibility. They were very quick to judge and publicly shame Apple for not considering accessibility. But Apple did. In the videos released immediately after the keynote, Apple designers discussed the ins and outs of the new system and mentioned “legibility” 13 times. Apple has had a long history of supporting customers with disabilities, dating all the way back to 1987.
I also saw a lot of “Steve Jobs would never have approved of Liquid Glass.” I’m sorry, but I hate that line of critique. First of all, we can’t ask him since he’s not alive anymore. Second, the new UI is not that different than Aqua, Mac OS X’s first UI language. I think he’d love it.
Another line of criticism was that Steve cared more about how it works instead of what it looks like. And so what does Liquid Glass do? Casey Newton of Platformer had this exact thought:
Liquid glass looks like the product of a design process led by someone saying "Make it look good." I'm sure it "works" fine. But I'm not sure what it is meant to do that its predecessor did not.
Back in 2002, Steve famously said, “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. …That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
People misinterpret this quote all the time to mean design is only how it works. That is not what Steve meant. He meant, design is both what it looks like and how it works.
Steve did care about aesthetics. That’s why the Graphic Design team mocked up hundreds of PowerMac G5 box designs (the graphics on the box, not the construction). That’s why he obsessed over the materials used in Pixar’s Emeryville headquarters.
As designers, we need to care about both the function and the form. Graphic designers need to ensure the content is front and center and presented in an aesthetically-pleasing way. UX and product designers need to make sure software is usable and not an ugly hot mess.
Programming note: This newsletter and the blog will be on hiatus starting Wednesday, June 18, 2025. My family and I are going on holiday.
Highlighted Links
 | I’m sure you’ve seen it before. But whether you’re 22 years old or 50, Steve Jobs's advice still resonates. I love the clarity in this scaled-up version that the Steve Jobs Archive just released. |
 | Sara Paul from NN/g spoke with seven UX practitioners to get their take on AI and the design profession. “Our panelists return to a consistent message: across every tech hype cycle, from responsive design to AI, the value of design hasn’t changed. Good design goes deeper than visuals; it requires critical thinking, empathy, and a deep understanding of user needs.“ |
 | Figma remembers Bill Atkinson, creator of MacPaint, and that they are standing on his shoulders. “Every day at Figma, we wrestle with the same challenges Atkinson faced: How do you make powerful tools feel effortless? How do you hide complexity behind intuitive interactions? His fingerprints are on every pixel we push, every selection we make, every moment of creative flow our users experience.” |
What I’m Consuming
Why I have slightly longer timelines than some of my guests. Dwarkesh Patel has interviewed many of the players working in AI. He thinks reaching AGI will take longer than they think. (Dwarkesh Patel)
Artificial Intelligence Is Not Intelligent. Counterpoint against the AI hype: “Despite what tech CEOs might say, large language models are not smart in any recognizably human sense of the word.” (Tyler Austin Harper / The Atlantic)
Agentic AI: Fostering Autonomous Decision Making in the Enterprise. “The capital and potential seem evident, but growing agentic systems is a complex undertaking. A useful analogy for the rough road ahead is the ongoing journey toward self-driving cars.” (Josh Tyson / UX Magazine)