Design Matters, Even (or Most Importantly) When It's Invisible

This may be old news, and I may be slow on the uptake, but look at this:

This is a screenshot from Apple iTunes showing the track listing of an album along with its cover. I was looking at this idly, waiting for another 2am concall, when it struck me that the colours used for the track info were a remarkable match for the album cover.  I looked at another album, and saw that its text also matched, yet clearly with a  different colour scheme:

Now, usually I listen to music on a separate iPod - not really paying much attention to what's on screen. This has floored me, though. Somewhere along the line, someone has decided that having nice fonts, cover art & whatnot is not enough - the entire visual effect related by the album's cover design should be used to cue the metadata associated with the music. Not only that, but that has been integrated with a reasonable clever programming effort to determine what the colour scheme of the album is, and how best to represent the text effectively.

Here's another example:

This whole thing is an example of concern about the complete design of an interface which seems, frankly, lost on a vast proportion of people. That isn't to say that people don't appreciate it - but rather that people don't even think about it, and may not have even consciously noticed the effect, although they may notice something "off" if it wasn't present, and may like the look of something without being able to explain why.   Architects (real ones - in the built environment) face this sort of thing all the time:  people often don't see the value in good design until they experience it for themselves.

Much as I love UNIX & Linux, in that world chances are the graphic design would go no further than placing the cover art in a bounded box, with the track info all in regular text with regular colours on a regular background.  Informative, maybe even reasonably attractive, but lacking the near-invisible design that makes this & many other Apple products such a satisfying user experience.

So maybe "invisible design" is something to aim for.