YouTube launching new Material Design interface, including a dark theme
It's time to bring one of Google's most successful properties to modern design standards.
YouTube is refreshing its interface across the web and smartphones, undertaking a complete Material Design refresh to make the experience cleaner and easier to focus on videos. The main layout of the website is remaining intact, but the entire look is simpler, flatter and cleaner than ever before — something that should come as no surprise if you've used Google's other websites or Android apps lately.
The big focus is making YouTube simple and approachable for everyone, which visuals that don't distract you from the reason you're there in the first place: to enjoy the videos. YouTube can historically seem a bit busy or confusing to casual users, and this redesign should hopefully help with that. It also brings a visual consistency to Google's other properties, which is always important.
Two words: dark theme.
Perhaps the best thing heavy YouTube users will find about this redesign is the inclusion of a complete dark theme, which will dramatically cut down on eye strain when watching videos at night. All you have to do is toggle it on through the account menu, and the entire interface goes dark permanently.
If you want to try out the new YouTube look before anyone else, you can head over to youtube.com/new to opt in. If you don't find it to be to your liking right now, you can return to the "old" interface for the time being from your account menu.
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