The latest YouTube redesign begins with a splash of color up top. It uses “dynamic color sampling” to tint the screen space around the video player to match the video. The status bar above the video player and the area below it, where you find the video title, upload date, channel name, and more, get a gradient finish with ambient colors extracted from the video. Playlists also get the same ambient color treatment and now show more details. YouTube has been testing this feature for some time. The changes are now rolling out on mobile apps and the web client in dark theme. Speaking of the dark theme, it is now darker than ever. YouTube is switching to a pitch-black background with grey-ish housing for action buttons and comments. It makes the colors “truly pop on your screen”. Earlier, the whole background was grey with no separate housing for buttons. This change will be available on Smart TVs as well. YouTube’s blog post also officially announces the redesigned button layout that was in testing for the past few months. Action buttons, such as like, share, and save, now sit below the channel name, and as said earlier, get separate pill-shaped grey housings with Material You design language. The subscribe button, meanwhile, gets a white background with high contrast, making it easier to spot. This applies to both the video player as well as the channel home page.
YouTube is also adding a couple of new features
It’s not just aesthetic changes for YouTube this time around. We also have a couple of new features in tow. For starters, precise seeking helps you rewind to the desired spot in videos. When dragging or swiping back on a video, you will now see a row of thumbnails. This will help you fine-tune your rewind and avoid going too far back in the video. YouTube already shows you the most replayed parts of a video and also lets you skip to the parts that you’re most interested in watching. The other new feature coming to YouTube is pinch to zoom. As you’d expect, it lets you zoom in and out of a video on Android and iOS YouTube apps. The video stays zoomed in after you lift your fingers. All of these changes should be available globally over the next few days. Make sure to keep the YouTube app updated.
