The good folks at Linear have proven that a design-led company can carve out a space against an entrenched company like Atlassian. They do this by having very strong opinions about how things should work and then pixelfucking the hell out of their products. I truly admire their dedication to craft.

When Apple introduced Liquid Glass, they decided to write their own version of it for more control. Robb Böhnke, writing on Linear’s blog:

Liquid Glass is a beautiful successor to Aqua. Its primary purpose is to feel fluid and friendly for a broad consumer audience. Apple has to design for every kind of app—education, entertainment, banking, fitness—and build systems that adapt to all of them.

We have a different set of constraints. Our users come to Linear to do a specific kind of work in a focused environment. That gives us freedom to push the design in specific ways Apple can’t.

In that sense, we saw an opportunity to take Liquid Glass’s aesthetic qualities—its translucency, depth, and physicality—and apply them with a ProKit philosophy: purpose-built, disciplined, and designed for sustained focus.

ProKit—as Böhnke explained—was Apple’s “pro” theme, the slightly flatter, less flashy big brother to the lickable Aqua. It was “built for professional tools like Final Cut or Logic with complex, information-dense workflows where clarity and control are more important than visual flourish.”