Alright, I don't want to sound rubbish or be a kill joy but someone has to say it from time to time:

Stop wanting to redesign every new digital product big players put on the market. It sure can be improved, it sure might lack usability, but redesigning things from a simple "user interface" point of view has no sense. Is the gradient colors really what bothers you most here ?

Big corps like Apple or Google have designers army (and I mean real designers specialized in UX, in UI, on business development and product design, not guys who's Twitter bio says they do it all by themselves). Designing a product is a very long and complex process, and you can be sure there's a meaning behind each design decision Apple makes.

Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to kill your enthusiasm. And this is just my point of view. Designer's community has also a role to play for bringing new ideas on the market. I also feel like Apple Music is sometimes messy, but I don't know about all the research, studies and development Apple did behind the scene, that's all. So no, I don't believe in redesigning things for the sake of it, I find it quite pretentious actually.

Great. Let's gather a design team of 80 people, a marketing team of 160 people, and 200 developers. Then we can start!

Weekly reviews. We need it shipped in 6 months.

Good luck.

Ok, Please finish your redesign quickly so that I can redesign how your redesign should have been according my design handbook.

Yeah

To those who feel that the suggested exercise is completely pointless and Apple MUST have spent a lot of time deciding why something looks/works in a particular way, I present you these points:

1. Many design decisions in large organisations are not necessarily taken by designers. It could be a VP of a product pushing for a change because he/she 'feels' so. There are unhappy designers because the company ended up choosing a route that they personally didn't vote for.

2. If you stop criticising an app's looks just because some large company built it, you might end up not criticising everything that they do. Healthy criticism is good.

3. Large companies, including Apple make mistakes and ship them. Remember Apple Maps?

4. OP hasn't suggested working on a startup idea to compete with Apple's music service. OP seems to find it a fun task to do together. If OP is wrong, he'll actually learn why Apple did it in a particular way and probably share it with us. He wouldn't have to shut down his 'startup' or something like that.

I wish people would stop moaning about designers' unsolicited redesigns of existing products.

Yes, we know that there are reasons why a product looks the way it looks. We know that Apple have done a hell of a lot more research than someone in their bedrooms looking at the finished product. We know that Apple have more talented designers who answer to more talented managers than us.

But that's not what this is about. It's a design exercise, kind of like taking an artists pencil drawings and inking over them and colouring them in. It's fun and makes you better at what you do.

The problem is just that non-designers look at the redesign and say "OMG that's sooo much better than what Jony Ive did". We all (should) know that's just not true.

Mind you, the headline is not very clever, and shows a bit of delusion, but hopefully the author will grow up when he (/she?) becomes a better designer.

I love that this community has some of the best in the industry within it, however the literal motto of Designer News is Be Nice. Or Else.

I frankly don't care about the OP's experience, I've been teaching myself design work for over 5 years and still have a ton to learn. Additionally, as many of you have probably also experienced, working on actual projects with an end goal, a target audience, and set of UI/UX design challenges can be more helpful in your development as a designer than anything else.

Many in this thread pointed out this is only a design exercise, and thats exactly what it is. No one here is trying to go and unseat the great Ive from his position, we all worship him as we should.

But for the love of design, can't we just give people a break? If someone wants to redesign an existing product just for, and I quote: "If nothing else, we'll all leave a little better at collaborating with new people and have some fun, but I do expect us to have something awesome to put our names to by the end of it." Then why wouldn't we, as a community, support that?

I don't have a lot of time, but I'm more than happy to collab on a redesign of Apple Music, sounds like a fun project to me.

If you really want to show Apple how it’s done, why not put your effort into building a viable competitor and bring it to market?

My goal was to initiate a (hopefully) fun exercise, a spare time project; not to create a new product to rival iTunes or to dish Ive (who is not on the Apple Music team or directly responsible for every layout). I was also not aiming for a purely aesthetic redesign, where we slap a few of the latest trends on, with no consideration for what the product is supposed to do, whom it targets and so on.

I am disappointed. A designer should have an eye for problems and a mind for solutions, not cower up to trends and venerate what the big companies are doing, even when they fuck up.

Wow. Things got heated in here pretty quick, huh? Here's my proposition:

If you want to do a redesign, then do one, especially if it seems like a good exercise for you.

If you don't want to do a redesign, then don't, especially if it seems like a waste of time to you.

I love designers because we are passionate about the little things, but we could afford to be a little less venomous towards one another, don't you think?

Feels like this post has been a bit unfairly maligned. The concept of "the pointless redesign" surely can't stop designers sharing their ideas for how they would design things as long as we accept the limitations of the exercise.

To me, his tone is more "Wouldnt it be fun to redesign it and collaborate with each other" rather than "I know how to design it, give it to me you're all doing it wrong"

PLEASE. STOP. REDESIGN. SERIOUSLY.

I don't think you should because you don't know the scope of the project or product (in this case Apple Music) you're looking at. What you'll end up doing is making it looks nicer but the design problems that needed to be solved are still there.

I'm looking forward to the Eli Schiff post about your redesign.

It should be really simple. IT’S FREAKING UGLY. — Apple should be the one to know they should not deliver things like this. However, the general public accepts everything thrown on the market nowadays. (Just because it's Apple)

Seriously, after Steve Jobs left, quality control became something which is definitely not Apple's top priority. They might refine it later, but It scares me how they ship things looking like mock-ups nowadays.

If you think, we are the customers/consumers: we don't re-design, we just tell it's looking really bad and expose that to the author so they can fix it. It works like that with us isn't it? — I am not sure if anyone fancies a client redesigning the work you just delivered. We probably wouldn't put any credit on their re-design because we would think it's their opinion and not ours.

There should be a better way to fight against these design aberrations Apple is throwing at us lately. A way to publicly expose that and demand feedback? After all, again, we are all their customers.

And again, as customers, we don't need to be designers or developers, it's just a common sense of knowing whether something looks and behaves nicely or not. — and this, definitely doesn't.

Yeah! It seem like they have no taste. I mean bad taste. I'm not sure. If they have no taste I think that's better than bad taste. Bad taste kills it. What constraint are they working within to come up with that ugly gradient? lol The alignment and white space is off balance at least for the love of god improve on that. Thank you!

I'm enjoying the new "small list size" option on iTunes desktop. Other than that? Not super impressed or disappointed - just an update that I'll get used to in a week or so. Not terrible.

The one major issue I see is that when an album cover is predominately dark grey, that background mask makes text very hard to read.

I also don't like that you can start playing an album immediately (on mobile) by pressing the album cover in list view, even when existing songs are playing. Should either not play at all (Expected action is drilling down to songs / albums by that artist), or at the least append to "Next playing", not interrupt current playback immediately.

Just remove the iTunes constraint and you'll have a seriously large head start.

At this point, Apple has lost my trust. It's taken me a while to get here, but we've arrived. These updates lately have been consistently bad. 100% will be moving to Android and Material Design on my next phone.

Well, as people pointed out there are several constraints and things that happened in the backstage.

But you know what? If you wanna fix something from Apple, fix that dreadful Apple Mail that looks like it came from Windows 95 to haunt us. You might end with a good product that you can actually ship.

God speed!