About December 1st the YouTube Team launched the
new Homepage, new Channels, and a new overall design.
Many partners have been playing around with the new design
for several weeks, using Cosmic Panda and more recently Channels_Preview.
Obviously the change is coming, maybe in a few weeks, but
definitely within a month or two. So last week I began to seriously play with
the new design. It is easy (now) to opt-in and opt-out of the new design and I
figured I might as well get used to it before we have no choice! J
Note: when you opt-in to the new design everyone visiting
your channel will see the new design.
Here is an image of my new design and my old design.
As you see, my old background was a photo of water and had a
half-dozen photo images, three per side. By any standard it was busy, looked
best on 1366 pixel or smaller monitors, but this was the norm at the time.
As I played around most of last week attempting to create a
background for the new channel design, I was very frustrated. No matter how
much I tried, I was very unhappy with how cluttered my channel looked. I
realized I was trying to bring the old to the new.
After looking at a few other partner channels that have
switched over to the new channel design, I noticed they were all using a simple
and clean design. I realized the way to go was a simpler background that
doesn’t compete with the focus of the channel, the videos. So, I went with a
simple feathered background, a dark-blue background that will look good on any sized
monitor and a brighter light blue that draws your eyes to the featured video.
I used the same banner on my new channel design background
as I had on my old design. On the new design the banner is part of the
background and it is not a separate image. So now I have a bright, clean, and
simple channel background.
What do you think of my new channel design?
Have you switched to the new design?
What does your background look like?
CaptRob
