Someone at Apple thought it would be a good idea, a few years ago, to have iTunes display content in certain views using colors extracted from album artwork. Sometimes this is quite attractive. But sometimes, this borders on torture.
Here’s an example; a playlist I made of Ultravox’s first three albums:
While I understand how some people like “dark themes,” there is no way that this display meets any minimum standards of readability.
Here’s a close-up, that shows the text at closer to actual size:
There’s an orange font on a black background, with a barely readable font for the duration and artist name. How can anyone thing that an app should display content like this?
Granted, there are ways to change this. The first is to turn off a setting in iTunes’ General preferences. Uncheck the Use custom colors for open albums, movies, etc. option, and it looks like this:
Or, open the View Options window (View > Show View Options), and choose to view the playlist as Songs.
But how did Apple’s designers not see displays like the one above and tweak the algorithm so they simply couldn’t happen? Anytime the dominant color of an album’s artwork is dark, you get these horrid, unreadable contrasts.
It’s almost as if it was intentional…