Apple's Liquid Glass just won a Gold Cube at the ADC Awards

Almost a year after Apple unveiled Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025, the design language that has spent twelve months getting roasted on social media just picked up one of the most respected honors in the industry. The Art Directors Club handed Apple a Gold Cube for iOS 26's Liquid Glass, plus three more cubes across other categories. The short version: actual designers really like this thing, even if your group chat doesn't.

What Apple won

The ADC Annual Awards, now in their 105th year and hosted by The One Club for Creativity, are about as legacy as design awards get. Apple's haul for Liquid Glass:

• Gold Cube, Interactive / UX / UI
• Silver Cube, Experiential Design / Digital Experiences
• Bronze Cube, Experiential Design / Consumer Experience
• Bronze Cube, Innovation

That Gold Cube is the second highest honor the ADC gives out, behind only the Black Cube best in show award. Apple has won Black Cubes before, for the "Barbers" iPhone 7 Plus spot in 2018 and the "Bounce" AirPods short in 2020. Across the full 2026 ceremony, Apple took home six Gold Cubes, including wins for the Apple TV rebrand and the "I'm Not Remarkable" accessibility ad.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman summed it up on X in a way that's hard to argue with: "Turns out actual designers like it."

Why this matters when users have been so loud

Here's the thing: Liquid Glass has not had an easy first year. Readability complaints have been steady across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, iOS 26 saw one of the slower adoption curves in recent memory, and Apple has been quietly walking the effect back with every point release. iOS 26.4 even added a toggle to reduce glare. A new design refinement is expected in iOS 27 at WWDC 2026, and Gurman has reported that macOS 27 will get a "slight redesign" to address the same legibility concerns.

So how do you square user pushback with a Gold Cube? I think the answer is that they're measuring different things. The ADC jury is rewarding craft, ambition, and the systemic thinking behind a design language that scales from a watch face to a Mac. Users are reacting to whether a notification is legible at a glance on the bus. Both can be true at once.

What excites me is the second act

I'm cautiously optimistic about where this goes. Apple now has external validation that the design language itself is sound, which gives the team more room to tighten the edges without throwing the whole thing out. The Liquid Glass we get in iOS 27 should be the same idea with sharper readability and more controllable transparency. That's the Apple I want to see, the one that ships a bold swing and then keeps refining it instead of retreating to safe.

Apple's design team took a real risk with Liquid Glass, and the people who do this work for a living just told them it was worth taking.

What do you think? Has Liquid Glass grown on you, or are you still waiting for Apple to dial it back? Let me know in the comments.

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