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A sneak peek at YouTube’s new look and feel

By Brian Marquardt

Director of Product Management

YouTube is where you come to watch your favorite creators -- whether that means jamming with Alex Aiono, gaming with Strawburry17, or hanging out with Logan Paul. That’s why we’re working on a redesign of the desktop experience that highlights your favorite videos and creators while making YouTube easier and more fun to use.

Starting today, we’re opening up a preview of the new design to a small group of people from all around the world so we can get feedback. While we hope you'll love what we’ve been working on, we’re also really excited to involve the YouTube community so we can make the site even better before sharing it more broadly.

We’re applying Material Design to YouTube to deliver a beautiful, delightful and intuitive user experience. The key principles of this new design are:

  • Simplicity: The only thing you should be concerned about is watching the content you love. The new design is clean and fresh, thanks to the removal of visuals that can distract from your browsing or watching experience. We're focused on making the content shine!
  • Consistency: The new design is aligned across Google platforms, including the YouTube mobile app, while still providing the features you know and love.
  • Beauty: We strive to combine beauty and purpose to create an effortless experience.



The site design is built on a new, faster framework named Polymer, which enables quicker feature development from here on out. And today, we are introducing one of the first new features developed on Polymer: Dark Theme. Developed to cut down on glare and let you take in the true colors of the videos you watch, Dark Theme turns your background dark throughout your entire YouTube experience. This is only the beginning -- you can look forward to more powerful new features coming soon!

If you want to try out YouTube’s latest look, you can opt-in to preview the new design at youtube.com/new. You can return to the current design by selecting “Restore classic YouTube” from the Account Menu. And don't forget to send us feedback from the Account Menu.

We're still working on the new site, so we hope you'll try it out now and let us know what you think!

Brian Marquardt, Product Manager, recently watched “Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen/PIKO-TARO.”
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