Icon Composer
Icon Composer is Apple’s bespoke application for giving your icons that Liquid Glass flair.
When Apple announced the Liquid Glass updates coming to its OS 26 suite of applications, it also released a bespoke new application, Icon Composer, to developers to help give their icons that Liquid Glass Flair.
The app, free to download from Apple's website, is still very basic, but it has the bones to become a powerful application in the coming years. Apple has really pushed for a consistent app icon experience across its OS 26 releases, so releasing an app that helps developers design icons that fit the liquid glass aesthetic is a great move on Apple's part.
Apple describes Icon Composer as:
“Icon Composer lets you create layered icons out of Liquid Glass from a single design for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. With a new multi-layer icon format, you can easily adjust Liquid Glass properties, preview with dynamic lighting effects, and annotate across appearance modes. Icon Composer is designed to work seamlessly with Xcode, and also provides the option to export a flattened version of your icon for marketing and communication needs.”
The Icon Composer UI.
The app is not a standalone tool that helps you through the entire design process, as it still requires you to use a separate application to create assets. In my case, I used Sketch to design the individual layers and imported those SVG files into the composer to assemble my icon. But once the layer is imported, it can be adjusted in several ways, including opacity, size, and blend mode. Additionally, you can also adjust how each layer of the icon appears in light, dark, and mono (aka clear) modes to ensure each variant looks picture-perfect. Finally, there's an array of solid/gradient backgrounds to toggle through to help you visualize exactly how your icon looks and adjust the contrast to make sure it really stands out - especially important for clear icons.
Liquid Glass Toggle
The icon on the left has the Liquid Glass toggle turned off, while the icon the right has Liquid Glass turned on.
And if you were doubting whether you had the chops to create that Liquid Glass look, Apple has made it dead simple. It's literally a single toggle. This is easily my favourite part of Icon Composer, because with one switch, you can turn a flat layer into a dynamic, dimensional piece of glass.
Room for Improvement
But this is still a very early iteration of the app, and there are many Janky pieces in areas for continuing improvement. Resizing and positioning layers is a hassle, you can’t make any shading/blur effects inside the app, and you can't rename layers once you've imported them. But some of these are minor enough frustrations that can hopefully be ironed out in point releases over the coming months.
In Sum
If these look familiar, it’s because they are. These three icons from Steve’s iPhone announcement keynote have been fully reimagined with a Liquid Glass finish.
Icon Composer really serves as the final step in the icon design process. It's the perfect lightweight tool for anyone who has already built their images and layers elsewhere, then brings them in to apply the slick Liquid Glass effect and make those final tweaks to colour, opacity, and contrast. It also serves as an final checkpoint to ensure your light and dark variants look just as good as you intended. For novice to intermediate designers who may not know how, or don't want to spend the time manually crafting a Liquid Glass aesthetic, it's a genuinely handy tool.
