Since most Google webapps have been redesigned in the recent months in an effort to make them more visually consistent (with mixed results), it was bound to happen to YouTube sooner or later. Tonight I got a preview of the new design, which is only available for me in Chrome, stable channel – so not even in the Canary version I use more often. It’s probably a random experiment based on a cookie and Google Operating System already mentioned how to enable it. The biggest change that you notice right away is the changed background color of the page – a soft gray matching the top bar in search, Calendar, Docs, instead of white – and a different favicon shaped like a ‘Play’ button! The white background returns only while hovering over related videos or search results to highlight them. The buttons have been redesigned, becoming bigger and – like in the case of Google Reader – with less color, predominantly grey. On the home page, the ‘Watched’-label is now grey as well, making it very hard to spot. While you can argue for and against the grey colors and lack of contrast, replacing the favicon is likely a bad idea, since YouTube’s is already famous and instantly recognizable, basically a part of the site’s identity.
YouTube’s usual design as viewed in Opera
The experimental design in Google Chrome
Along with the new design there are some minor changes to the Flash player and the final screen. The ‘Full screen’ button on the bottom right has been replaced with three size options for regular, expanded and full screen. On the final screen, the action buttons now have their captions back – a good thing, they’re easier to distinguish this way – and instead of the 12 equal-sized thumbnails you now get a bigger ‘Featured video’ with another eight similar videos – not that nice for me, because I rarely navigate to the featured video.
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