The service is getting a new typeface and color scheme, The Verge reports.
For the last 12 years, YouTube’s logo has been a pair of anachronisms wrapped inside each other. “We have the word tube in a tube, ” says Christopher Bettig, the head of YouTube’s art department. “This is weird. No one know what this is.” Tube is slang for a television set, which used to be powered by vacuum tubes. But neither tubes nor TVs are central to the world’s biggest video service, which now reaches over 1.5 billion people each month, streaming to almost any screen with an internet connection.
Source: YouTube
And so today the brand is getting its biggest aesthetic makeover ever. The YouTube logo is being refreshed, shifting the emphasis away from the word “Tube” and onto the familiar play button which has already become an iconic shorthand for the company. The service is also getting a new typeface, color scheme, and a bunch of major changes to the look, feel, and functionality of its desktop and mobile app.
Though today’s logo change is the most significant in YouTube’s history, it’s not a complete transformation, like the morphing of Uber’s silver U into a backwards C. “It’s an evolution, not a revolution, ” says Bettig. But the company is also using the moment to announce a basket of new features, planned changes, and ongoing experiments. The new look is a ribbon that ties these moves together, highlighting the company’s broader shift from a singular website to a family of different apps that stretch across multiple platforms.
The challenge facing YouTube’s design and interaction team when they launched the redesign two years ago was how to tie together a host of products with very different audiences and uses. What started in 2005 as a singular website built for desktop internet users now exists on phones, tablets, game consoles, and, yes, television sets. What’s more, YouTube is no longer a single brand. Over the last few years it has spawned a family of services: YouTube Kids, Gaming, Red, TV, and Music. “We felt, because of all that growth, we were missing the mark. We wanted to make something more unified and cohesive, something that really reads as YouTube, ” says Bettig. “We were hoping to build a visual language that would make it easy for folks to recognize it.”
Bettig, a Frenchman who joined Google six years ago and has been with YouTube for the past three, led the charge to rethink the logo. Since YouTube was evolving into a whole family of services, and since it had adapted to fit each screen and video format, Bettig and his team experimented with a dynamic brand. “We had a symbol that was loosely reminiscent of a Y, but it would be always changing, animated, and pulling color samples from the video you were watching. It could potentially pull the profile picture or header art from the channel you were watching. So you have these dynamic elements that would all be intersecting.”
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This approach worked well when the designers had it mocked up on a white wall in their studio and in simple prototype apps. “Then as soon as we dropped it in product it was like, oh yeah, that’s not going to work, ” said Bettig. “It’s pure chaos.” In the end, the art department decided to keep things simple. They would put a new spin on the logo, but rely on iconography that had, over the years, already come to signify the brand. “Over the years, organically, that play button, that UI element that is front and center on every video, became a brand ambassador, an unofficial shorthand.” In consumer research, the team found there was little difference in recognition between that icon and the word YouTube itself. “This thing has taken on a life of its own.”
Once they had decided to keep the play button and wordmark, the team set about modernizing them. “The old logo has a typeface from 1903, alternate gothic number two, and it’s been manually tweaked, so there are weird design nerd things that are off. The U in Tube is not the same as the U in You, so if you take them and overlay they don’t exactly line up, ” said Bettig. The same went for the play button, whose four corners weren’t all rounded the same way. These were little tells, for those with a keen eye, that design had taken a backseat over the years to scaling the product and supporting new features. There was no art department at YouTube until Bettig started it three years ago. Now he and his team had the chance to clean things up.
They decided to ditch the original typeface and design one of their own. They experimented with fonts based on styles from classic television and the VHS era as well as more modern looks. In the end, they went with something that retained the essence of print. “We wanted to keep the history, and the tension of a media typeface that was made in 1903 to be typeset manually with a digital platform that reaches farther than any newspaper of the time could ever conceive of.” For the play button’s updated color, the team tried to find a grounding in the medium. “Looking at reds, we wanted to go for something that would tie to video, ” Bettig explained. They settled on #FF0000, “a really pure red that goes to the RGB of video.”
The new font, logo, and color are rolling out today on YouTube’s desktop and mobile app. The goal now is to work them into the entire family of services the video giant now offers. “As we diverge from the main product, how do we grow but clearly communicate, even to casual users browsing the app store, hey, this is a Youtube product, ” says Bettig.
Along with a new logo, the desktop and mobile app are both being updated to bring them in line with the Material Design aesthetic that extends across Google’s properties like Android, Search, and Docs. “We’re a high density site, so that makes Material a great base to build on, ” says Robert Thompson, the design lead for video viewing and navigation. Moving to Material means there are fewer shadows, boxes, and forms on each page. “It helps make the site feel more comfortable and readable, and brings the content to the foreground.” Like the new logo, the move to Material helps to weave a common design language across an ever-expanding universe of apps.
Along with unifying design, YouTube is working to bring feature parity to different versions of its service. Starting today, variable speed and night mode, two popular features on the desktop, are both arriving on mobile. And while it hasn’t happened yet, the design team says well-received features from mobile may soon migrate over to desktop. Mobile has a mini-player that allows you to continue watching whatever video you have in progress while also browsing for the next clip you want to see, and YouTube is testing a version of that for desktop web browsers.
If Bettig’s challenge was how to unify the look and feel of YouTube’s ever expanding family of apps, the goal of the product team was to ensure that users got the best experience out of YouTube, even as the number of ways they might use it continues to grow. “We started with a website and SD video, ” says Manuel Bronstein, the vice president of product management. “We’re in a world where people are watching HD video on mobile devices, and streaming on tablets and TVs. We have to be able to adapt the experience to best suit the device and context in which people are consuming it.
