Apple and Google just agreed on something and it affects how your shop looks

I sat down at a gem and mineral show in Noblesville last spring. Every vendor had a table. The vendors who spread velvet under their stones sold more than the vendors who used white paper. Same gems. Same prices. The velvet does something the paper can't: it gives the stones a sense of value before anyone picks them up.

I think about that table whenever I talk to a shop owner about their brand.

What Apple and Google found in the same year

In June 2025, Apple announced Liquid Glass at their developer conference. It rolled out across every iPhone over the following months. The design is built on layered surfaces, translucency, depth, and material feel. Things exist behind other things. Light reflects. Shadows fall.

Around the same time, Google was finishing its own shift. We wrote about the research behind it earlier this month: 18,000 people tested across ten apps, and users found designs with personality and warmth to be more trustworthy and easier to use. Google responded by building more expressive shapes, motion, and visual weight into Android.

Two companies, two separate research programs, one conclusion.

Flat, clinical minimalism (the aesthetic that dominated apps and websites from roughly 2013 to 2023) was making things feel generic. And generic reads as low-quality. Not necessarily to the conscious mind, but to the eye that scans a screen in half a second.

Flat is a choice. It used to say "modern." Now it says "2018."

Why your brand is sitting inside this shift

Your shop's visual identity doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in the context of what your customers see all day.

If someone uses an iPhone, and 57 percent of US smartphone owners do, their phone has been showing them depth, texture, and layered surfaces for eight months. Their eyes have recalibrated. When they look at a flat, minimal logo on a flat, minimal website on a flat, minimal business card, their brain compares it, without them realizing, to every layered thing they've looked at today.

This doesn't mean you need a glass effect on your menu. It means the visual vocabulary of "polished" has shifted. Anything that reads as thin, flat, or clinical may be aging faster than it was two years ago.

What to look for in your own brand

I don't want to make this sound like an emergency, because it isn't. But when I look at a shop's brand right now, a few places where the 2018 aesthetic sticks out tend to be the same.

Font weight. Hairline fonts had a long run. That thin, all-lowercase wordmark was modern in 2017. It's now the default look of a Squarespace template. A font with actual weight, something that occupies the space it sits in, reads very differently. You don't need a display font. You need a font that isn't apologizing.

Contrast. Gray text on a lighter gray background made sense when "subtle" was a virtue. Now it's just hard to read. Strong contrast, dark on light or light on dark, looks more current and more confident.

Background texture. The pure-white-background era is winding down. Not dramatically, not overnight, but you see it in editorial design, in print, in the best Instagram grids across every industry. A slight texture, a warm tone, a background that's doing something: it changes how everything on top of it reads.

Photo depth. The flatlay had its moment. Photos that show your product or space with real light, real shadow, and actual depth of field look more current than overhead arrangements on white marble. This applies to your website photos, your Google profile photos, and anything you post on Instagram.

None of this requires a rebrand. Some of it is one new photo. Some of it is swapping one font.

Should your shop actually do anything?

Probably not today. But there are two signals worth paying attention to.

First: if your brand was designed before 2020 and hasn't been touched since, it's worth a look. Not because it's broken, but because the context it lives in has changed.

Second: if you feel like your shop looks less impressive online than it does in person (and a lot of shop owners tell me this), that gap is often a design problem. The in-person experience has texture, depth, and warmth. The website has white space and thin type.

Those two things are not describing the same place.

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Design trends move in long waves. The wave that brought us flat minimalism was a reaction to the cluttered, skeuomorphic design of the early 2000s. The wave arriving now is a reaction to the other extreme: too minimal, too clean, too nothing.

Apple and Google didn't invent that reaction. They just measured it first.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Apple Design Gallery — developer.apple.com	Apple's Liquid Glass design system, announced WWDC 2025, rolling out across iOS 26 in 2026.
2	What's new at Google I/O 2026 — Material.io	Google's Material 3 Expressive updates shipped alongside Gemini Intelligence direction.
3	Material 3 Expressive: Google's New Direction in UI Design — UX World	The 18,000-person research program and what it revealed about warmth, personality, and trust.
4	Liquid Glass — Wikipedia	Timeline and scope of Apple's Liquid Glass design system rollout.
5	iOS 26 Liquid Glass UX Review — Toko DesignLab	Analysis of how Liquid Glass affects user perception and design expectations.
6	Top Web Design Trends for 2026 — Figma	2026 design direction including the shift toward depth and expressive type.

All links current as of June 2026.