YouTube will now be much more minimalistic visually, as it puts even more of the focus on the videos by streamlining the site’s look using a web design style developed by Google known as Material Design. The new design will be consistent across all Google platforms, so YouTube will look the same regardless of whether you’re watching on desktop, a smartphone, tablet, or TV app.
The revamped design will be accompanied by a handful of new features. As the name implies, Dark Theme will apply a dark background to the website and be present throughout your browsing and video-watching experience. According to YouTube, the goal of Dark Theme is to “cut down on glare and let you take in the true colors of the videos you watch.”
Dark Theme is the first of many features being built on a new, faster framework called Polymer, which will enable hastened feature implementation in the future and, hopefully, an even better viewing experience for the site’s ever-expanding video catalog.
If you’re curious about the new design and want to check it out for yourself, just opt in to test out a preview of the new site. Should you give the new site a whirl and decide you’d rather stick with the current look for now, clicking on “Restore classic YouTube” in your YouTube Account menu will do the trick. As this is an early preview of the site’s new design, YouTube is asking for users to provide their feedback about what they like and don’t like, which can also be done through the Account menu.
You can check out the new design by going to https://www.youtube.com/new.
