Praveen Manchi
By Praveen Manchi
Jan 12, 20266 min
UI Trends
Visual Design
Design Retrospective

UX/UI Design Trends of 2025: What Actually Stuck

Bento grids kept spreading through 2025 rather than fading, and Apple's Liquid Glass revived glassmorphism at WWDC that June - while kinetic typography and heavy 3D mostly stayed confined to marketing sites. A year-later look at which 2025 predictions held up.

UX/UI Design Trends of 2025: What Actually Stuck

  1. Bento Grids

    Bento layouts kept spreading because they show mixed content, a stat, screenshot, video or quote, in one modular grid.

  2. Liquid Glass

    Apple's Liquid Glass, announced at WWDC in June 2025, revived glassmorphism with real-time rendering that reacts to content behind it.

  3. What Faded

    Kinetic typography stayed on marketing sites, and heavy immersive 3D gave way to talk of immersion fatigue.

  4. AI as Infrastructure

    The biggest 2025 shift: AI moved from marketed feature to infrastructure, quietly improving search, defaults and content generation.

[ TREND AUDIT ]

Trends that solve a problem are the ones that stick

Looking back at 2025 UX/UI design trends, bento grids and Liquid Glass held up while kinetic typography and immersive 3D faded. Function, not decoration, separated lasting trends, and AI became invisible infrastructure.

  1. Bento grids
  2. Liquid Glass
  3. Kinetic type
  4. Immersive 3D

The Trends That Were Actually Right

Predicting design trends a year out is mostly guessing. Looking back at 2025 from here, a few calls held up, and a few didn't.

Bento Grids: Still Standing

The bento-box layout - named for Japanese lunch boxes - kept spreading through 2025 instead of fading. Notion, Framer, and most SaaS marketing sites default to it now. It survived because it solves an actual problem: it lets a page show heterogeneous content (a stat, a screenshot, a short video, a quote) in one modular grid without forcing everything into the same card shape. That's function, not decoration, which is usually the difference between a trend that sticks and one that doesn't.

Glass Is Back, and Load-Bearing This Time

Apple's Liquid Glass, announced at WWDC in June 2025 and rolled out across iOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and its other platforms that year, revived the glassmorphism look that had mostly died with Windows 11's Fluent Design and macOS Big Sur back in 2020–2021. The difference this time: Liquid Glass renders in real time and reacts to the motion and content behind it, rather than being a static blur applied to a panel. Whether that distinction survives a thousand third-party apps imitating the surface look without the engineering behind it is still an open question a year on.

What Actually Faded

Kinetic typography - text that moves to carry emotional weight - showed up across a lot of 2025 marketing sites and mostly stayed there. It never crossed into product UI, because moving text fights the scanning behavior product interfaces depend on. Heavy immersive 3D had the same problem at a larger scale: common through 2025, but by year's end the wider industry conversation had shifted toward "immersion fatigue" - the recognition that making something interactive isn't the same as making it clear, and clarity is what most products actually need.

The Real Story Wasn't Visual

The most consequential shift in 2025 wasn't a layout trend at all. AI moved from a marketed feature toward infrastructure - quietly improving search, defaults, and content generation in ways users mostly didn't notice as "AI." That's a harder trend to put in a roundup, because there's no screenshot for it. It's also the one that will still matter in five years, unlike most of the ones that do have a screenshot.