What were Apple thinking?

A murmur of amusement and disbelief swept across the office like a Mexican wave last week, as one of our designers upgraded to iTunes 10, with most of the Riff Raff team huddled behind his monitor. “You’ve got to see this” he said.

The new iTunes icon

It wasn’t the slick new UI or Ping integration that had caught their attention (more on that later), but the godawful new logo design.

I’ve read a lot of quite ferocious criticism of the new icon, most of which berates Apple for their rejection of an instantly recognisable brand. But from a design point of view, it makes perfect sense to me.

Apple are quite rightly moving away from the audio CD as representative of a music industry that has since moved on (it’s so 1990’s after all). Like it or not, downloadable music is here to stay, and Apple played a huge part in making that happen.

The music CD will soon join the audio cassette as nothing more than a dusty old medium supported only by legacy car stereos. So I totally understand the decision to move on.

What I don’t understand is the chosen design. I’ve seen $3 stock icons with more charisma than this. As one of my designers pointed out; “It looks like an example from a ‘How to create shiny buttons’ tutorial in a design magazine”!

Bad Apple.