As part of their major changes in terms of usability and look for all their products, Google launched a new public project. Cosmic Panda is their new vision of YouTube’s interface, a design that gives a much clearer perspective of its content.
Being based on video content, YouTube service will receive a much more fluid and visually detailed design including enlarged video thumbnails with 16:9 aspect ration. The content of your channel or the related playlist will feature larger pictures for any video compared to the tiny thumbnails present now, and the comments field can be hidden and replaced anytime by the suggested list of videos.
A welcome change will be also made for the background color. Instead of the polar white that works but somehow forces your eye especially when you watch darker video clips, you will get a dark grey background that will reduce the eye strain. Another important change will be the fact that you can change the dimension of the screen by browsing different size boxes. It’s a very intuitive way of controlling your watching experience.
Playlists will become an important feature of the service, achieving their goal of being more social. You will get a visual representation for each of your playlist and a timeline where you can order or re-order its content and even the option to loop them if you want.
Overall the new design for YouTube service is already welcomed by many users and in the end it seems the final version will be mostly unchanged to what now the project Cosmic Panda has to offer.