UI Design Direction 2026–2027

UI is already exploring exciting new directions, but doesn’t need new “morphisms”

Spotify changed their flat logo to a disco-ball image for their 20th anniversary and the internet started talking about a new “disco-morphism trend”.

As someone who coined two morphisms already (neumorphism and glassmorphism), let me break it down for you and explain why I stopped naming new morphism and why you probably should too.

There is only one exception to this rule.

A truly interesting trend that hasn’t been fully figured out yet, so there’s potential for both innovation and obscurity. And another one that has a lot less use-cases, but can be extremely refreshing for some products.

Spotify’s celebratory (temporary) rebrand was named “discomorphism”

There’s metal-morphism, disco-morphism, Squircle-morphism, light-morphism and many, many others. There’s also a rather funny Figma joke we’ll also go through.

These are all subsets of Skeuomorphism though. They’re not something that specifically makes sense as a separate trend.

Let’s talk about why.