Apple Music's new logo started as sound, not a sketch

On 21 October Apple unveiled the Apple Music new logo and the identity around it, which it calls "Made by Sound". The mark did not start on a screen. A piece of music by the producer Fred again.. and his collaborator NEST Acoustics was broken into single notes, each note was played through a transducer sitting in a shallow bath of mineral oil, and the ripples and the light bending through them were filmed. That footage became the logo, as 9to5Mac and Creative Boom both describe it. The agency was TBWA\Media Arts Lab, according to Adweek and DesignRush.

Around it sit a wordmark set in bold lowercase in a customised version of SF Pro, Apple's own typeface, a sonic signature built from the same composition, and an app icon that drops its familiar red for black and white. The icon had already been spotted in beta software at the start of the month, which is when MacRumors first reported it; on launch day the new look went live on Apple's website.

Two arguments are happening at once

The first argument is about the icon, and it is mostly not going Apple's way. The monochrome icon has drawn a backlash, with much of the reaction calling it dull, and a common complaint in readers' forums is that none of the liquid, rippling idea behind the identity reaches the small square on a phone's home screen. That is a fair point about icons in general: at the size of a fingertip, a colour does more work than a concept. Red was how many people found the app without reading its name.

The second argument is about method, and here the identity has something to say. Much of this year's design conversation has been about images that are generated rather than made. Apple chose to make its mark by filming something physical: a real composition, a real tank of oil, real light. Coverage framed it exactly that way, one headline announcing neither artificial intelligence nor digital effects behind the mark. Whatever you think of the result, the brief behind it is an old and good one. Do not invent a look and apply it to the thing. Get the look out of the thing.

That is why the music matters to the logo. The shapes are not a picture of sound in the way a clip-art waveform is; they are a trace left by particular notes. A different song would have left a different mark.

A look taken from the material is a look nobody else has

Most of us will never commission an identity, but we make the same choice every time we put photographs and words together. A wedding album, a birthday booklet or a trip written up for the family can borrow a look from somewhere else: a template's colours, a theme picked because it was first in the list. Or it can take its look from what is already in it.

Your photographs already carry a palette. The marigold orange of a haldi, the deep green of a Kerala backwater, the grey-blue of a hill station in the monsoon, the warm yellow of a room lit for Diwali. Pull the paper, the ink and one accent colour from those pictures and the pages feel as though they belong to that day and no other, for the same reason Apple's ripples belong to that song.

The trap is the one Apple's critics have spotted. A concept that only lives in the explanation does nothing for the person holding the finished thing. A colour taken from a photograph still has to be readable as type on a page. A pale saffron that looks lovely in a picture can make body text impossible to read if it becomes the ink.

Where Atlas stands

This is close to how the editor in Atlas is asked to design an issue. When you ask it to lay out your issue on the desk, it looks at small previews of your photographs and reads your story, and its instructions ask for a palette (a paper, an ink and an accent) taken boldly from the photographs, so the issue looks made for that story rather than dressed in a house theme.

It also guards against the trap. Before a palette from the editor is used, the desk measures it: the ink has to stand out from the paper by a contrast ratio of at least 7 to 1, the enhanced level in the web's accessibility guidelines and the kind of contrast print relies on, and the accent has to reach 3 to 1 against the paper because quotes are set in large type on it. A palette that fails either test is dropped whole and the issue keeps Atlas's own colours. The code's comment puts it plainly: the house colours are a better issue than a mended guess.

So that no two issues come out alike, each request to the editor also carries a few design moves drawn at random on the server, such as cutting a page into rows of very different depths or printing one page dark. And before you ask, you can pick an art direction: leave it to Editor's choice, take one of six named looks from Riso zine to Nightfall, or choose Your own brief and describe the look in up to 400 characters.

Two things to know. The editor is the one part of Atlas that sends photographs anywhere: small previews of your pictures and your words go to an AI provider to make the design, and are not kept. Otherwise your photographs stay in your browser, unless you choose Save & share, which seals each page before it is uploaded. And it needs an account, with a monthly allowance of designs: two on the free Wanderer plan, five on Traveller and twelve on Cartographer. If you would rather not use it, the house styles and the ready-made pages in Atlas Studio need no AI at all, and our guide to filling a Studio layout walks through them.

What to try this week

Take one set of photographs you care about, from any occasion, and find its three colours before you design anything.

1. Lay the pictures out side by side and pick the lightest colour that keeps coming back. That is your paper.
2. Pick the darkest. That is your ink, for the words.
3. Pick the one colour that makes the set feel like that day. That is your accent: one headline, one rule, one page printed in it.
4. Check the ink against the paper with any free contrast checker. If it falls short of 7 to 1, darken the ink until it does, rather than giving up the paper.

Then set one page with only those three colours and see whether it looks like the day it came from. Apple needed a tank of oil and a hit producer to get its identity out of its own material. You already have yours.