Memorables

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphism makes digital objects feel physical again: tactile buttons, switches, paper and dials.

Skeuomorphism makes digital objects look and behave like physical ones: buttons with real depth, paper that tears, metal that reflects light, dials that click. After years of flat design it is coming back, this time driven by motion and physics rather than textures alone. This page gathers tactile buttons and switches, paper and metal effects and controls inspired by hardware, many made in SwiftUI, by designers such as Lorenzo Cabra, Benjamin den Boer and Oleksii Besida.

22 works by 21 creators, newest added 8 November 2026. Each is credited to the people who made it and links to the original.

All 22 Skeuomorphism

  1. Flip the Switch(es) by Jonathan Lindgren — A 3D animated short in Cinema 4D and Redshift, made with the sound studio The Soundery, where a plug, a switch and a flip clock turn a still life into a chain of tactile clicks.
  2. Metal Toggles by Benjamin den Boer — A 3D render of toggle switches as objects, the on and off states cast as shallow tins of brushed silver and dark gunmetal, a skeuomorphic take on the most common UI component.
  3. Weather Scrubber by Praneeth Jonnala — A SwiftUI weather app with Metal shaders and haptics, where dragging a time scrubber repaints the whole screen hour by hour, from afternoon sun to rain on the glass and a lightning storm.
  4. Pivot by Kim Hyo Eun — A product film for Pivot, a portable DJ transition device concept inspired by the Teenage Engineering TP-7, with physical sliders, a big split dial and Bluetooth for practice on the go.
  5. Radian Touch by Oleksii Besida — Radian, a Chromium browser for the Mac built around Apple’s features, driven by a finger on a MacBook Pro screen, a playful answer to Apple’s line that you’ve gotta touch it to believe it.
  6. macOS Folder Icon Timeline by Raul Dronca — An interactive timeline of the macOS folder icon from 1984 to 2026, where dragging one scrubber morphs a single folder through every era, from 1-bit pixels to Aqua and today’s flat blue.
  7. Aging Button by Florian Kiem — A button micro-interaction for a UI that ages with use, where every click leaves wear on a blue Save button until smudges and chipped paint make it look like a worn physical key.
  8. Boarding Pass Scanner by Mike Barton — A skeuomorphic drag interaction where a boarding pass is swiped through a scanner of lovely aged plastic, its little screen running from READY through ERROR before letting you in.
  9. MD Vinyl on iPhone Duo by MD Studio — MD Vinyl, a vinyl-style player for Apple Music and Spotify, adapted to the folding iPhone Duo, whose crease turns a 3D shelf of covers into a turntable when half-folded.
  10. Crumpled Receipt by Lorenzo Cabra — An interactive UI component for Bencho, where a till receipt crumples into a paper ball at a click and can be tossed into a bin, skeuomorphic physics for a throwaway gesture.
  11. Tear-off Ticket by Lorenzo Cabra — A drag interaction for a boarding pass UI component, where the seat stub really tears off along its perforation, swinging on the cursor with a ragged edge before the ticket resets.
  12. CrumpledPaper Reveal by Matt Ölschlegel — A free Framer component that turns any image into a crumpled sheet of paper, smoothing it flat on hover with its creases still showing, then balling it back up.
  13. Image Compressor by Gabriel Obholz — An image compressor UI that takes the word literally: the file is fed through a skeuomorphic desktop machine and squeezed like paper in a press before it is ready to download.
  14. prekesh.design by Prekesh Chavda — The portfolio website of a designer at Poolside, formerly at Vercel and Sketch, built as an interactive 3D gallery where icons, stickers and drawings drift by on retro tiles.
  15. Realistic Button by Adam Kowalski — A skeuomorphic button UI component that remembers being touched: each click sinks it a little and leaves a fingerprint, until the label is smudged with overlapping prints.
  16. Focus Music Maker by Shivani Matlapudi — A focus music maker web app that turns doodles into an ambient soundtrack: draw on the dot-matrix screen of a small skeuomorphic device and it plays while you time a work session.
  17. Paper Match by Ollanski — A paper craft stop-motion animation of a match that strikes, burns and smokes, every spark, flame and curl of smoke cut from paper and moved by hand, frame by frame.
  18. SHARPA D01 by LEAPX — The industrial design of SHARPA D01, a humanoid robot with an upper body on a wheeled base, its tactile e-skin covering every area meant for contact beneath a smooth pod-like head.
  19. Metal Effect for SwiftUI by Jakub Antalik — A metal effect for SwiftUI that answers a real object on the table: bring a magnet near the iPhone and the rim of an email field catches the light, ready to use on libraries.dev.
  20. Inflatable Cursor by Mohammad Alhaj — A 3D icon render made in Blender for day 1806 of a daily practice, where the mouse pointer, the most everyday interface icon, turns soft, tactile and puffed up like an inflatable.
  21. Giza Crypto Agents by Bakers Studio — A crypto app design for Giza and its AI agents, a calm, almost tactile take on fintech mobile UI where the whole interface is built around one glowing pearly sphere holding the balance.
  22. The Life of a Button by Cole Derochie — A UI concept that tells the history of interface design through a single component: dragging a timeline from 2026 to 1986 morphs one button from flat blue to glossy Aqua to pixel Mac.

Featuring work by

Lorenzo Cabra, Jonathan Lindgren, Benjamin den Boer, Praneeth Jonnala, Kim Hyo Eun, Oleksii Besida, Raul Dronca, Florian Kiem, Mike Barton, MD Studio, Matt Ölschlegel, Gabriel Obholz, Prekesh Chavda, Adam Kowalski, Shivani Matlapudi, Ollanski, LEAPX, Jakub Antalik, Mohammad Alhaj, Bakers Studio, Cole Derochie.

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