Today at the much hyped Apple Event “It’s Showtime”, Apple announced significant changes to the iTunes logo. Here are the images:

	Months of design work. Thousands of ideas.
V6. Before		V7. After

The Musical Note

The thing that immediately hits you is the colour change. They have taken the plunge and gone straight from green to blue for the musical note. But that isn’t the only change. Not by a long shot. Just look at the shape of the note. The bar between the notes has got thicker (or “taller”) and has a new style of sheen which makes it look less 3D. The angle of the top of the note has slightly changed too and it has been lowered with respect to the disc behind it. Whilst the left corner of the note used to coincide with the edge of the CD behind it the CD is now higher at that intersection. The effect of this is seen throughout the image. No longer can the white background be seen between the two sticks of the note at the right hand side. This triangle of white is completely lost. The balls at the bottom of the note seem more rounded. Their angling has changed too and they are less elongated and more spherical. The shadow effect of these on the bottom disc beneath has totally changed. The old logo shows a clear shadow to the lower right of both balls whereas the new design has much lighter shading for the shadow and whilst it is to the lower right for the leftmost ball it is not seen at all for the righthand one.

The CD

The disc itself has also been changed. Again the most dramatic change comes with the colouring. The spectrum has been completely reversed in a rather bold move with the red in the lefthand spectrum now starting at the bottom. It’s center has changed to now be a lighter shade than the rest of the disc and due to shape changes in the disc (as well as repositioning decisions) you can no longer see through the disc’s central hole to the left of the left stick. The only viewpoint via which the hole in the disc can be seen is actually between the sticks themselves. Back with the spectrum, we see the colours have been really focused or “deblurred” for this new release. The spectrum is much more split up compared to the very smudged approach seen in the original design. The disc seems to have been raised vertically too. By this I mean that it is standing more upright than previously. The main indication of this is seen in the shadowing behind the disc of which more can be seen.

This is clearly a hugely significant change. And to unveil it on the same day as new iPods, iPod Games, iPod Movies, iTV to come, and a revamped iTunes program is incredible. Needless to say, the logo is shipping today.

Update: I think we were all kind of wondering if Apple would go full out and update front row to match the blue. And we shouldn’t really have wondered. Of course they did. They aren’t however so pedantic to update the information about front row on say the Mac Book page. Good for them.