Glassmorphism done right
It is not blur, it is material. Depth, hierarchy, and how light should behave.
26 articles
Blur is the implementation. Material is the idea. Confusing the two is why so much translucent design looks like a filter rather than a surface.
Saturation is doing the work
A backdrop blur on its own looks like frosted plastic. Add saturation and it looks like glass, because real glass concentrates the colour behind it rather than washing it out.
The pairing matters more than the amount. Twenty-four pixels of blur at a hundred and eighty percent saturation reads as a material. Sixty pixels at a hundred percent reads as a mistake.
Depth needs an edge
Translucency alone does not create layering, because the eye cannot tell where one surface ends. A single hairline at the boundary does more for perceived depth than any amount of shadow.
What it costs
Backdrop blur is one of the more expensive things you can ask a compositor to do, and it is expensive per frame while anything behind it moves. On a static window it is free; on a scrolling list it can be the difference between smooth and not.
The mitigation is boring: blur small regions, not large ones, and never blur something that sits above a scrolling container if you can put it beside one instead.
Accessibility
Text on a translucent surface has a contrast ratio that depends on what is behind it, which means it does not have one. Either put the text on an opaque plate within the translucent surface, or ensure the worst case still passes. Measuring against the average background is measuring the case that does not matter.