14 DAY TRIAL // Users on Reddit have spotted a live version of Google's upcoming YouTube redesign, one that uses more Material Design elements than the current version.
YouTube received a light Material Design facelift a few years back when the company started deploying its custom-built visual design language for all of its major products like Android, Google Search, and Gmail.
Last year at the Google I/O conference, Google's design gurus made some changes to the Material Design language, further advancing its core elements.
The changes are subtle, but they are still there
Some of these changes made their way into Android 6.0, so it's natural that they are now making their way into Google's money-maker project, YouTube.
The most glaring changes are YouTube's homepage and channel pages, with fewer changes in the actual video (playback) page, where Google only changed the background from white&gray to full white.
The main YouTube side-menu received a stylistic makeover, along with the YouTube logo, which is darker and more compact. Additionally, user channels are now more colorful, showing a bigger banner than before, along with a color that seems to be dynamically extracted from the most recent video.
Site buttons also have larger shadow now, giving them more depth and popping out from the page at first glance.
Here's how to use it yourself
Currently, the skin is still under testing, and we've seen the site look different on Opera compared to Chrome and Chrome Canary.
To give the new redesign a test drive before it goes live, here are the instructions provided by Reddit user giorgiomarinel. The instructions are specific to Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Chrome Canary, Opera).
Step 1: Access YouTube through the following URL: www.youtube.com/?gl=US (the site's US version)
Step 2: Open the browser's developer tools by pressing CONTROL + SHIFT + I
Step 3: Select the Resources tab, select the Cookies, select the youtube.com domain, and delete the entry (cookie) named VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Step 4: Go to the Console tab and run the following command:
document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=Qa1hUZu3gtk;path=/;domain=.youtube.com";
Step 5: Close the developer tools and refresh the page.
