Published 19 September 2026 · Source dated 1 September 2026
Creative Market's 2026 trend forecast flags 'Glasscore' — blur, glow and translucent layers — as a rising visual style. For teams running token-based design systems, that means more theming flexibility, not just flat colour tokens.
Creative Market's Next in Design 2026 forecast names 'Glasscore' (blur, glow, liquid gradients, translucent layers) among the visual styles gaining ground this year, alongside warmer, more tactile aesthetics generally. That's a trend report, not a system spec — but it's a signal worth feeding into design system conversations: rigid, flat-only token sets don't flex well for glass, depth or texture effects.
If your team's design system only defines flat colour and spacing tokens, this is a nudge to ask whether elevation, blur and opacity tokens are on the roadmap.
**Why hype:** it's a trend forecast, not adoption data — treat it as a direction to watch, not a system to copy wholesale.
Coach
Open your team's (or a starter) design system file and check whether blur/elevation tokens exist — if not, sketch one variant using Figma or Penpot's effect styles.
Google's Material Design 3 popularised dynamic, token-based theming back in 2021, and it's still what most design-system setups get measured against. If you're building variables in Figma or tokens in Penpot, M3's structure is worth studying, not because it's new, but because it's proven.
open Material 3's token docs and compare their primitive-vs-role token split against your own Figma or Penpot library — note one gap you could fix this week.
Some teams are wiring AI coding assistants into their design token workflow, using rules and MCP connections to keep components consistent. It's promising but still fragile in practice.
pick one component in your (or a practice) design system and check whether its tokens are named consistently enough that an AI tool could use them without guessing.
As canvas agents and coding agents start operating directly on design files, how well-structured your tokens are starts to matter for machines, not just humans. It's early signal, not proven best practice yet.
open your current Figma or Penpot file and check whether your colours and spacing are real tokens/styles or just hardcoded hex values — fix one screen's worth.
