The design industry spent a decade burying skeuomorphism. Flat won. And now that AI can generate any flat interface in seconds, physicality is interesting again.

Daniel Rodrigues and Lucas Fischer, writing for Every, describe designing the iOS app for Monologue, a smart dictation tool. Rodrigues studied Braun radios and Teenage Engineering synthesizers, and at one point found himself crouched beside his apartment light switch watching how the shadow moved. His defense of skeuomorphism:

Skeuomorphism has been accused of being overdone, and fairly so, but I think of it as borrowing the credibility that physical things naturally have, like weight, shadow, and texture. Something similar to the way a real button communicates—without explicit explanation—that it can be pressed.

This isn’t a texture pack in Photoshop. Rodrigues studied how light behaves on a physical button and rebuilt that behavior in SwiftUI. The texture is functional, not decorative: it tells you the thing is pressable. Rodrigues and Fischer:

Not every AI product needs skeuomorphic buttons and custom sound effects, but the bar for what “functional” means is shifting. AI is making it faster and cheaper to build “functional” products, so the ones that endure are those where someone thought about what it feels like to use them. For us, that meant studying physical objects, exploring 20 wrong directions to find one right one, and hiring a musician to build sounds we could have pulled from a stock library.