Iconography in Apple Music

Before language developed to the point it is today allowing humans to express themselves using groups of letters, ultimately creating words, eventually forming sentences on to paragraphs finally opening the space for works from Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison. In early forms of writing such as cuneiform and hieroglyphics humans communicated more similarly to the emoji’s we have today. In hieroglyphics pictographs represented letters we have today, interestingly these pictographs were modeled after animals, agriculture, and other items ancient Egyptians saw in their everyday lives.

In one of my favorite mobile applications, the Apple Music app, since it serves a simple purpose there are not a plethora of different icons however the ones that are present are effective and practical. When you first open the app there are four navigation categories at the bottom of the screen which are Library, For You, Browse, and Radio. The Library icon displays a group of vinyl records, For You a heart, Browse a music note, Radio uses airwaves, and Search the universally employed magnifying glass. Out of all these I think that the Library icon is the best because it connects music back to one if its earliest recording forms and makes you think how far playing music has come, where essentially you can hold thousands of vinyl records right on your phone. Some other aspects are when you first add an album or song a cloud icon pops up to the right of it to notify you that the music is in the cloud until downloaded. This engages the user in two ways, on a more basic level of simply identifying that it’s a cloud being represented in the icon and secondly it asks them to have prior understanding of how “the cloud” works in technology today. 

Humans have always found it easy to useful to communicate ideas through symbols and pictographs from everywhere from stop signs to the small images on our computer. I believe it’s a common understanding that we sometimes are able to quickly identify an idea in its iconographic form before reading or even that small image can be an aid to spark synapses and connections within our brains. As humans we are not solely literary learners but we also comprehend through our other sensory emotions.