Apple has redrawn the Apple Music logo for the first time since the service launched in 2015, and the new one wasn’t really drawn at all. It was played. Fred again.. and the sound studio NEST Acoustics wrote a short piece of music, split it into single notes, and sent each note through a shallow tray of mineral oil. A camera filmed what the oil did, and that footage became the brand.
How you film a sound
The key part is a transducer, which is close to a speaker with no cone. It turns an audio signal into a physical shake. Put one under a thin layer of liquid and every note leaves its own pattern on the surface, rings for some pitches and busier, crinkled shapes for others. People have been watching sound this way for a long time. Ernst Chladni bowed metal plates dusted with sand in the 1780s, and the Swiss scientist Hans Jenny gave the whole field its name, cymatics, in the 1960s.
The clever part is what’s under the oil. Cutouts of the wordmark and the note icon are laid beneath it, and as the ripples roll across, the oil works like a moving lens. The letters bend, double up and snap back into place. Apple says the movement was captured in camera, so the wobble you see is the music itself.
It took months to get right. According to Creative Boom, too many notes, or notes pitched too high, churned the oil so hard the logo stopped reading at all. So the music and the picture had to be tuned against each other, which means a chart-topping producer ended up writing for a puddle. We love that!
The note, the word, the missing capital
The note icon went through the same tank, and its new shape comes from the movement the cameras caught. In the finished app icon the note sits in a glassy square with a thin rim of color around the edge, like light caught at the lip of a wave.
The wordmark changed too. It’s now set in a custom cut of SF Pro, Apple’s own typeface, bold and all lowercase, so the capital M is gone and the red tile with it. Our honest take: standing still, the new mark is plainer than the one it replaces. The life is all in the motion, which is why it looks best on a screen or a wall, mid-ripple.
Twice in a year
Apple has done this before, and recently. Last November the Apple TV logo sting turned out to be real cut glass in a studio, with the camera sliding past it and crew members moving the lights by hand, set to a short theme by Finneas. The same production company, Optical Arts, made both, with Apple’s longtime agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab. It’s starting to look like a house rule. The software has gone glassy and liquid, so the brand gets made from actual glass and actual liquid, on camera, by people. We’d happily watch a whole series of these.
The new mark first showed up at Apple Music Hall, the company’s new live venue inside the old Battersea Power Station in London, and it’s rolling out across the app with iOS 27.2. If you like where this sits in the bigger story of the company’s design, our guide to the design that shaped how we live picks up the thread, and so does Jony Ive’s Ferrari interior.
Credits: music by Fred again.. with NEST Acoustics. Film directed by Joe Jackson, produced by Optical Arts, VFX by Time Based Arts, color by Trafik, mix by Model Citizen. Type consultation and logo reconstruction by Plau. Agency: TBWA\Media Arts Lab. Via Dezeen.
