Glass. Gel. Glossy. Glow. Shiny. Plastic. Pill. Capsule. Jelly bean. Whatever you call them, icons that mimic the reflective, semi-transparent nature of glass are everywhere, making the web look like a big bag of marbles.
As far as I can tell, the trend was launched by the Aqua OS X interface six years ago. Steve Jobs said he wanted buttons that look so good you'd want to lick them. Within hours of the demo, knockoffs were appearing on the web. Within days, haters were dismissing it as merely pretty and cute, beneath the attention of the hardcore command line O.G. Within months, dozens of reverse-engineered tutorials on how to create your own glass buttons had been written. And within years, Microsoft got around to putting glass into Windows. All of which is to say, it's interesting.
But why are they so popular? My guess is that they're visual cheesecake. Cheesecake combines a number of desirable qualities (sweet, fat, savory) into an improbable, almost grotesque taste bomb, artificially supersaturated with the taste triggers we've evolved to seek out. Back on the evolutionary savannah, these qualities were rare and attached to excellent energy sources, so we totally pigged out when we found them.
Gel buttons combine an unlikely number of qualities (depth, reflection, transparency) that trigger "realism". They're artificially supersaturated with visual reality, so they're especially fascinating in the arid, 2-D environment of the web savannah.
The natural next phase in the evolution of gel buttons will be to pack in more visual realism qualities like deformation on click, squishiness and realistic motion paths. The puritans will condemn it as yet more distracting eye candy while the rest of us pig out.
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