The Apple Music Subreddit Icon/Avatar looks broken and is hard to read..
Wondering if I am gonna get yelled at, but here goes:
Apple’s own design guidance emphasizes that icons should be simple, immediately recognizable, visually balanced, and legible at small sizes. That is where this one falls apart.
The colored distortion around the edges competes with the music note instead of supporting it. At full size it looks like a visual effect. At small Home Screen or subreddit avatar sizes, it can look like chromatic aberration, clipping, a bad mask, or an actual rendering bug.
The circular version is especially bad out of context. If I saw that as a tiny community avatar without knowing what it was supposed to be, my first thought would genuinely be that something had rendered incorrectly.
That is a useful QA test in itself. If a finished visual asset can reasonably be mistaken for a graphical defect, the design is introducing ambiguity where there should be immediate recognition.
There is no context for the water sound wave icon unless you saw the advert / art piece. I think that physical attempt at creating something was interesting and I applaud the idea, it was just a poorly designed icon, cool art, bad icon.
I do really care about this stuff.