Hello, Liquid Glass
3 min read Nov 11, 2025
I’ve made a wallpaper inspired by Liquid Glass and the classic Mac “hello”.
The story
In the world of Apple, there are a few things more iconic than the cursive “hello”.
It first appeared on the display of the Macintosh when Steve Jobs unveiled it at the Flint Center 40 years ago.
I have seen it more and more these days — in imagery used on Apple’s Developer website, on T-shirts, and more.
Recently with the release of liquid glass — the new visual design paradigm on all of Apple’s platforms — I noticed the cursive hello yet again. This time, it’s rendered in glass.
In Alan Dye’s introductory video there’s a prominent glass hello behind him.
Later on in the video it shows up again, but this time in frosted glass. I fell in love with the way the latter one looked.
After WWDC where liquid glass made its debut, I saw the cover art for the “meet liquid glass” WWDC session and instantly knew that I wanted a glass hello wallpaper.
I love the version of the hello that looks as if it was created from a single bent tube or was drawn from a 3D pen. Some Apple stores have physical versions of this attached to the wall.
I set out to re-create it myself.
Fortunately, with the wealth of community resources on Spline — a Figma-like 3D rendering tool — I was able to quickly prototype it. Then, I tweaked and tweaked and tweaked until the glass looked realistic and the contrast, shadows and highlights felt natural.
Exporting the final image took some creativity. I found that Spline would have problems rendering the glass when I exported the entire image. It also had issues if I were to export a very small crop, barely bigger than the hello. I used a hybrid approach where I used multiple exports and stacked them in order to remove artifacts that the Spline export was creating.
I do think I reached the limits of either Spline or my understanding of the tool. There are things that could be better and more realistic looking. For example, I found that the glass, when it overlaps itself, looks unrealistic. There is also a bit of color banding if you look close on a high-gamut monitor.
This project was a fun foray back into 3D and Spline. The wallpaper is available for download for Mac and iPad. Send me a photo of your setup if you end up using it.