Apple's new visual language in macOS 11 highlights a trend towards neumorphism, an iteration of skeuomorphic design that focuses on light moving within 3D space
If you watched Apple's annual WWDC event this week, or have been even casually observing some of the announcements the company made …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's WWDC reveal of macOS 11 Big Sur — the rounded corners, Control Center, and widget-filled Notification Center — was quickly read by designers as an aesthetic turn: within two weeks, commentary argued the company had lifted a ban on fun, allowing expressiveness it hadn't shown in nearly a decade. The mechanism behind the new look is neumorphism, which treats UI elements as surfaces lit within 3D space rather than flat layers.
Five years on, that turn looks like the start of a cycle: Apple's 2025 "Liquid Glass" overhaul and Airbnb's redesign alongside it are explicitly framed as skeuomorphism and dimensionality returning to mainstream interfaces — meaning this 2020 moment was the early signal, not a one-off restyle.
First-order effects
- Developers shipping Mac apps face an immediate rework: controls built for flat, layered design must adopt depth, translucency, and light-driven styling to avoid looking broken inside Big Sur's new chrome.
- Mac users get a visibly different daily environment — new Control Center, widget-based Notification Center, more expressive iconography — resetting expectations for what native software should look like.
Second-order effects
- Third-party design toolkits and icon vendors pivot toward neumorphic components and templates, since Apple's platform look historically sets the reference style the wider ecosystem copies.
- Competing desktop and mobile platforms feel pressure to answer the expressiveness swing or be read as visually stagnant against Apple's refreshed language.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, interface design is cyclically reverting from flat minimalism to dimensional, physically-lit visuals — a swing large enough that by 2025 it shows up beyond Apple, in redesigns like Airbnb's, suggesting the flat-design era was a phase rather than an endpoint.
The trend: Interface design is cycling out of flat minimalism and back toward skeuomorphic dimensionality, with Apple's macOS releases marking each swing.