All work 02 · Image processing

Liquid Glass

An image-processing tool that adds realistic refraction and specular-highlight effects to flat design elements, producing a "liquid glass" material look.

Image processing Procedural effects Design tooling
The Liquid Glass tool: a flat droplet graphic on the left transformed into a dimensional, glass-like version with refraction and specular highlights on the right, alongside the tool's control panel
Liquid Glass interface — shown with sample data.

01The problem

Creating convincing glass or refractive material effects on design elements normally requires manual compositing work in an image editor — redone by hand for every asset. It's slow, hard to keep consistent, and doesn't scale across a set of elements.

02What we built

A tool that takes a flat PNG element and programmatically applies refraction distortion and specular highlight layers, simulating how light bends and reflects through glass — turning a flat graphic into a dimensional, glass-like asset automatically.

Outcome

Produces a consistent, high-quality glass effect across any number of elements in a fraction of the time manual compositing would take.