

To anchor the sidebar visually as the starting point for browsing content, Big Sur uses color paired with the SF Symbols iconography. Dark gray chrome is gone, replaced by subtler shades to offset sidebars and other elements.Įven Music’s sidebar, which already ran the length of the app’s window, stands out in Big Sur with its use of the app’s icon color in the sidebar.Īlthough color has been eliminated from many parts of the window chrome in Big Sur, it still plays an important role in window design. Where once there were multiple shades of gray to highlight the top and bottom frames of windows and their sidebars, now everything is considerably lighter. In fact, if you squint a little, where previously a Finder window loosely resembled an index card with the title neatly centered along the top edge of the card, a Big Sur window is more like a book or a sheet from the Cornell note-taking system. The changes have the effect of shifting a user’s focus from the top edge of a window to the left side where content navigation is emphasized. Within the sidebar, the ability to collapse sections of textual information serves Big Sur’s goal of reducing information density, too, allowing users to focus only on what’s important to them. Translucent sidebars now span the full height of the window, interrupting the toolbar and any status bar or other elements along the bottom edge of the window. LookUp (left) and MusicHarbor (right) are excellent examples of upcoming third-party apps that have evolved from tab bar-based iOS apps to use the Mac’s sidebar.

The corners of windows, as well as nearly every other rectangular element throughout Big Sur, are more rounded than before too, lending them a more organic, softer feel than macOS 10. If the animation is too slow for you, hold down the Shift key make it appear immediately, which has the added advantage of making the entire title area part of the draggable proxy and expanding the file’s title if truncated.

The title bar’s proxy icon representing an open file is still available, but now, it only appears when you hover over the window title, animating into view after a short delay along with a caret that lets you pick a new save destination. Instead, the window’s title is in line with the toolbar’s buttons and left-justified. The toolbar is taller, but its iconography feels more compact without button borders. There’s a lot to unpack with Big Sur’s windows. The Finder window is a terrific example of how Big Sur window titles are left-justified, toolbar buttons are borderless, and search controls are often collapsed.
