Among Apple's strong showing of six total wins at the 2026 Art Directors Club of New York awards, the highlight was a Gold Cube honor for the controversial Liquid Glass redesign.
Liquid Glass has had some vocal opposition because of issues to do with readability across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and Apple is expected to show an improved version at WWDC 2026. But its initial release has earned Apple yet another Gold Cube ADC award.
The 13 judges on the jury have not yet commented on their choice, and may not do so until the official ceremony on May 15, 2026. But the pitch that Apple's in-house design team made for the awards reveals what it was aiming at.
"iOS 26 was designed as a holistic reimagining of how software could look, feel, and works," said their awards pitch. "Through simplicity, clarity, and efficiency, it establishes a design language that scales from the smallest detail to the system-wide structure."
"Refined typography, expressive iconography, considered materials, and cohesive colors work together to create an experience that feels coherent across every surface," it continued. "Parallax, driven by the device's sensors, adds a new physical dimension to the experience — grounding the experience in the real world to help it feel more human."
The Gold Cube is the second highest honor that the ADC awards bestow. Including its win for Liquid Glass, Apple took home six Gold Cubes in the 2026 awards:
- iOS 26 Liquid Glass - Interactive / UX / UI
- Apple TV rebranding - Cinematography
- Apple TV rebranding - Animated Logo
- "Someday" ad - Direction
- "I'm Not Remarkable" - Music and Use of Sound
- "I'm Not Remarkable" - Online Video
Apple's submission to the awards for "I'm Not Remarkable" said that "we set out to show students with disabilities are just like an other student, and at the same time demonstrate Apple's commitment to Accessibility."
Apple's ADC history
The six Gold Cube wins for 2026 equal the total it and its ad agency TBWA\Media got in 2019 for the "Welcome Home" film.
But Apple's strongest showing was in both 2018 and 2020 when it won the best-in-show award called the Black Cube. In 2018, that was for one minute iPhone 7 Plus ad, "Barbers."
In 2020, Apple's Black Cube award was for its "Bounce" ad, a two-minute film showing a man walking to work wearing AirPods.
The 2026 ceremony, called "The One Show," will conclude ADC's Creative Week. It will be hosted on Friday, May 15, by writer and comedian Leslie Jones at Cipriani Wall Street.
The future of Liquid Glass
Apple presented Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025 as an design overhaul that unified its different platforms. As Apple's design team said to the ADC jury, the aim was that it would deliver "a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more."
It was certainly a significant change, although the version shown at WWDC would be noticeably toned down in response to criticism before the public release in September 2025. Those changes tried to address concerns about Liquid Glass's translucency effects making some elements harder to read.
Shortly after the public release of Liquid Glass, one of its chief proponents, Alan Dye, quit Apple to join Meta. Nonetheless, just as with previous controversial redesigns such as the one with iOS 7, Apple is of course continuing with Liquid Glass.
Most recent reports say that Apple plans to make some minor changes to Liquid Glass for the forthcoming releases of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. It always would, though: every year these three OSes get at least iterative improvements.
So Apple is backing its Liquid Glass redesign, and it has also been encouraging developers to adopt it for their own apps. Yet Apple itself has been slow to adopt the redesign, with its own WWDC app only now getting a Liquid Glass icon.
