YouTube's New Hue

An ad interrupted my video today, it was Tom Hanks in a podcast talking about his prostate.

The ad was (not so obviously) AI generated; both an AI clone of his voice and an AI-generated face-swap/ lip replacement.

This seemed pretty surprising because it was fairly convincing. He looks like he is saying the dialog of the ad.

It's surprising because there's no way the creator of the ad got Hanks' approval to use his likeness; meanwhile Youtube is profiting by selling the ad. Seems illegal, yet i'm forced to watch the garbage.

The ad in general is part of a similar trend I've been seeing of these AI generated voices speaking fast about prostates or large eggplants (if you know what I mean) used with influencers' or podcasters' likenesses. I would never click on the garbage, and it's probably a scam anyway.

I just scratch my head wondering if this massive company realizes the garbage they are forcing into our lives.

> Robyn: To give YouTube a sense of motion, we created a dynamic red-to-magenta gradient. For the second color, orange and yellow were strong contenders, but magenta felt like the most natural pairing with our new red. Interestingly, magenta doesn't often appear in the natural world, so it symbolizes the imagination and evolution that YouTube embodies. We also placed the gradient at a 45-degree angle with magenta on the right, signifying forward movement.

Kinda reminds me of this quote

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

> There will be rich debates about the socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy.

A comment I made when I started noticing the magenta gradient at the end of the progress bar: it's a bit anxiety-inducing for those who remember needing to degauss their monitors, because it looks almost exactly like when you mess up a CRT with a magnet.

(Aside from that: not a fan, it makes the chrome of the video player more distracting.)

I absolutely hate the gradient on the progress bar. When a video is full screened I'm no longer able to tell at a glance how far along the progress bar is because the gradient and the grey segment for buffering all fades together. This is so simple to not mess up. It worked before. Why did you change it??

I literally can’t read this blog post because it keeps jumping to the top of the page to play the video again and again.

Maybe take 10% of the time you spent dreaming up new colors to just make your blog function like a regular page instead of adding a million weird animations?

On the one hand, this seems like a completely nonsensical, pointless change for the sake of change that has no tangible effect on UX.

On the other, something about the particular gradient used makes me deeply uncomfortable. Just obvious enough to catch your eye, but indistinct enough to make you feel like something's wrong with your eyes.

A change that accomplishes nothing and a change that degrades the experience are in theory mutually exclusive, yet somehow this feels like both.

> How did you keep the change from feeling overwhelming?

They’re really taking the piss. They changed the red imperceptibly and added a gradient that makes it look like a pamphlet that got discoloured from being in the sun too long.

Had I been on part of this change, I’d have been embarrassed of lending my name to this post and would have vehemently asked to be excluded. The fact they published it shows a lack of self-awareness and only makes graphic designers look like professional bullshitters. Add some random circles while you’re at it, go full Pepsi/Yahoo.

Reminds me of the infamous Pepsi logo redesign:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

These designers are grasping hard to justify their existence. Second part of the article harps on the importance of contrast yet the background is so overtly salmon it's almost impossible to read.

PC GPU architecture has special handling for cursors to ensure there is as little latency as possible. GPU's have a special buffer and position register for the cursor.

But for design.google they hijack the cursor rendering and this low latency goes out the window. First it's annoying that my expected cursor is replaced by some weird circle. But then that it's a laggy circle takes the cake. On a design website too. My computer has special optimizations to avoid cursor lag and your website broke them.

And screw low vision users who need a larger cursor to see where it is.

It also means you don't get the I bar when hovering over text making precisely copying text really annoying.

When there is such an immediate design issue with your design website it kinda takes away from the message.

Ha! My first reaction from this article is that someone is up for the next promotion cycle.

On Mobile Safari the page scrolls up to the top every few seconds. Adds a novel bit of interactivity to the article.

YouTube is such a horribly designed site. The best feature they've added in ages is the queue option, bet even that is busted as hell. Half the time an "add to queue" button appears on the thumbnail of the video, but the other half of the time it doesn't and you have to click the ellipsis menu. Even when you can click the button, it will select element of the page which leaves the video auto playing unless you hover back over it to stop. The queue itself disappears if you close and re-open the tab which is plain annoying. The video player itself sometimes breaks and requires me to reload the page. Ambient mode is annoying and I dislike it being on by default. Sometimes I click on a thumbnail but it has an on-hover action that spawn a link to their "about sponsored content" page right over the thumbnail where I wanted to click on the video, then when I hit the back button the home page has refreshed and the video I wanted to watch is gone.

Look at that new shade of red. The tasteful vibrancy of it. Oh my God...it even has a gradient.

What a colossal waste of time. The gradient on the progress bar made me think my tv had broken at first

For the longest time I thought being an artist rarely paid. now, it seems that all you have to do is work for a tech company and market your "innovative" re-designs to the right people and you'll get paid big bucks for what amounts to little work.

I sense that, albeit slowly, big companies are moving back to more complicated skeuomorphic-like designs.

Here YouTube’s adding a (very subtle) gradient. Better examples may be: compare the newest macOS icons to those from the Sierra (?); and the new Reddit logo has a slight 3D effect, while I remember the old one was flat.

Allegedly styles and fashion go in cycles, so maybe minimalism is going out of fashion. I doubt we’ll get old YouTube or OS X Snow Leopard, but we’ll get something different.

How to say you’re a monopoly without saying you are a monopoly, “Our refresh journey began by pinpointing YouTube’s most outdated elements through research. Color ranked in the top three, so we knew that evolving our palette would make an immediate and significant impact.”

The article keeps snapping back to the top as I scroll. (iOS safari, latest version.)

Why does anyone ever implement JavaScript that tries to mess with your scroll position? Like, ever? Can we stop this madness?

A bit off topic, but I noticed get this weird feeling when my cursor changes style. Something between a "let go of [free] my cursor" and "I wonder what secondary state I accidentally activated". It creates a weird sense of distress. Might just be me.

Though I did find it cool how it inverts the underlying thing. I thought it was a text-clipping type css property but it seems to invert media too? Any ideas how thats done?

> we created a dynamic red-to-magenta gradient. For the second color, orange and yellow were strong contenders, but magenta felt like the most natural pairing with our new red. Interestingly, magenta doesn't often appear in the natural world, so it symbolizes the imagination and evolution that YouTube embodies. We also placed the gradient at a 45-degree angle with magenta on the right, signifying forward movement.

I dislike these kinds of lofty rationales, especially when there are more pragmatic reasons available. They give license to mock the design industry as some kind of bullshit machine; attempting to shoehorn more meaning into banal executions. Design serves a necessary role in communication. I thought we collectively got over "pepsi breathtaking design strategy" style rationales?

I am a strong proponent of iterative design, and it's my expectation that this change is not a stepping stone that leads somewhere else, it'll be fashion for fashion-sake to impart a temporary sense of newness before being abandoned for the next web gimmick down the line.

If I were to have a stab at the direction it would be: We were tasked with making a change, not because we have a new direction or motive, but simply for newness. We understand that the company is entirely risk-averse with its largest brands and also experienced enough to understand that noticeable changes attract scrutiny. We've opted to hop on the bandwagon of adding a subtle gleam to our logo because it's minor enough that without this blog post you probably wouldn't have noticed it, and if there was a hint of negative push-back we could easily abandon the design entirely without much visual change.

> You’ll hear from six people who helped spin the color wheel:

Maybe I'm being a bit mean to UI/UX in general, but does it really take 6 people to decide a slightly different shade of red ?

I do appreciate good UI and UX but sometimes it does seem some of them are just trying to justify spending so much time and money on these (to me at least) banal things..

The page's background turns to fairly unpleasant pink once you scroll past the middle point. Is that the norm for design.google blog posts or is it some kind of subtle messaging about the new gradient?

Also the replacement of the mouse cursor with that negative-color circle is visually interesting, but it suffers a lot from input lag which gets on my nerves.

Market response:

Searching: <https://github.com/iv-org/invidious>

Playing: <https://mpv.io/>

Also, For Anyone's Info, black-on-red is impossible to read on monochrome displays. As with e-ink. Lesson learned as an anti-copy tactic for uni note-taking services, back in the day.

(Possibly not YouTube's core demographic, but a blog post shouldn't do that.)

This really makes my layoff feel worth it in the end.

Am I right that this article nowhere compares against the current red or even has anything with the current red in it, anywhere?

Is that a policy choice there? They don't want to.. not be future looking or something? I don't really get why. It made the article frustrating to read

Seems like the designers are trying to justify the utterly useless busy-work they've done here. That gradient is horrendous.

YT's user interface has been user hostile for over a decade.

The secret to sanity is to never use YT's interface to consume YT content.

I cover design. Talking about design this way gives designers a bad rep. Understandably so.

Not the most ridiculous design update description I've read, but still tough to get through the whole page.

What's the idea behind changing the cursor on desktop to a circular tap indicator?

Before they worry about color, they should worry about typographic principles. The rag on the headings and line length on paragraphs screams "we haven't done this before." Haunting that this is the work of six people (all being paid extraordinarily well, I'd imagine).

> six people who helped spin the color wheel

Oh. So this is what working at a big company would be like.

I'm just glad they aren't making yet another 4-main-color ambiguous app icon to confuse with every other Google app.

I don't mind continuous redesigns or small tweaks. I like it when products and apps I use subtly but constantly change. Form and function are one, it's not form over function if it's done well.

But for YouTube I wish they realized that the majority of the design visitors experience is in the user created content. And they should start policing it. A good first step would be to stop having user selected thumbnails. Video titles should be under the thumbnail, not word-art added on by the creator. Then the video thumbnail itself should be just be a calm still image representation of the video. A video having a thumbnail with a person having an extreme facial expression overlaid with enormous neon text should just be throttled to get 0 views by hiding it from view.

Make it windows 95 grey for all I care, just , for the love of whatever is sacred, improve the DOM to make it run smooth... I'm sure it is done to discourage you from using a browser and prefer their stupid app.

3 times the page just scrolled to the top. Doesn’t seem like the UX team at google really knows anything about user experience but gradient colors keeps things fresh!

I try not to be one of those people who resist any/all change just because it's change, but the gradient on the progress bar bothers me so much.

No mention that the YouTube logo had a gradient in 2011.

A lot of people suggesting paying for Premium. Value for money arguments aside, I see a huge problem here: sharing even more data (personal financial information) with Google.

I, personally, have zero trust in Google. That’s a company that went from “Don’t be evil” to “Be as evil as needed as long as it’s profitable.”

> Linda: We want YouTube to be a welcoming space for our broad user base regardless of demographic, so we stayed away from colors that felt domineering, cold, or corporate.

She's making hundreds of thousands of dollars, while most intelligent, honest, hard working people will never have any chance of owning a home or starting a family. That's all I could think of when reading this.

Good thing is that at least they don't dare to change it to four colour one like the rest of Google product.

When I was in college just a decade ago, my rather old computer science professor had an entire bookshelf of books: A reference library. Half of this reference library was books on UI design and UX best practices and how to make human friendly and human-centric interfaces.

This hard-won knowledge was the result of decades of observation by groups like the entire armed forces of the US on how to make systems that a 20 year old non-expert in a stressful situation can reliably use. It was the result of sticking people in front of computers and watching them make mistakes and figuring out what they intended to do and happen, so we could understand how people interpret an interface, and we used this research to make interfaces more discoverable and human-friendly. It lead to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law . All this work was used heavily for example in Windows 95 to make an interface that grandma would be able to use. This research is why my mother was able to eagerly utilize computers for her work with minimal training.

But fuck all that I guess. Why base UI and UX on empirical study when you can just make bad faith A/B testing prove whatever you want and just make a red more magenta because your company makes a billion dollars per employee and has a captured market and hasn't had to actually build anything useful in decades.

Good thing I use Invidious instead.

Amazing. Yet another overly specialized mobile website. Can't read the article because every few seconds it just scrolls back to the top.

I miss the days of html and little js.

CssZenGarden always had it right. That's where I learned early modern css during that transition from web1 to 2.

Whatever it's a new thing from Google that will make it more difficult to use whatever their product is.

Just disregard that millions of people know how to use things as-is, but to justify their jobs people need to change things that are working ok, instead of trying to do minor changes to improve the experience for the people on the edge.

Apparently it takes time to change a color, because in Germany we still have the old red. Bonus: There's already Telekom, which bases its entire Magenta brand about... the color Magenta.

Here is a tampermonkey script to disable the youtube progress bar gradient:

https://pastebin.com/WQATnsBU

Immediately disabled it with Stylus FF addon, I don't see any reason for that progress bar gradient. It's subtle enough to look like a styling defect.

This is a manifestation of Google drowning in excess headcount and unable to innovate because of endless fake make-work nonsense, where a team of highly compensated designers make the site less usable (gradient on the progress bar? Really?) and make changes for the sake of change, just to make it look like they are doing something.

This, staples "rebranding", openai's font change...

Is there really any benefit in these small changes? Certainly a good laugh out of it!

This looks like it was a colossal waste of time.

POS page won’t render properly on safari, keeps bouncing me to the top and I cannot dismiss some illegible overlay

Great read but the auto scroll to the top of site while I’m reading is super annoying

People do love trumping up what they have done. Developers feeling their project was absolutely essential when it might be more about NIH. But are any categories of people more used to trumping up their pointless work so high that any reasonable person would be too shameful to attach their name to the narrative? I guess PR people and politicians can compete with them or even take the first two places.

This doesn't take away from what wondrous thing a designer can achieve. It's an enormously difficult thing to design something that's functional and pleasing and in some cases provide a mood (calm, fast, serious). This sort of bullshit from what I imagine uber expensive designs rebranding major corporations simply highlights the value and rarity of a good designer.

I'm curious were they ever serious about their craft? Or the pursuit of promotion and glory took away their original ethos or they drunk the cool aid so much that they actually believe what they are saying?

I love pages that scrolls to the top each three seconds!

Well I just want to say thanks to Robyn, Amy, Jessie, Linda, David, and Tom for these changes. In retrospect they probably played a big part in keeping me on YouTube watching videos. Money well spent!

Is this satire?

Ah yes, the definition of Bikeshedding

Jesus, fix chrome so the selectable theme colors wouldn't look like a triplegendered person's boudoir. Meaning: fuk these pastel colors.

Youtube looks and feels the same, actually it got worse, in the last 10 years.

It's pink.

Beginning of the end?

Now it looks like Tinder.

Six well-paid Google designers trumpeting a new…gradient.

Maybe I’m too curmudgeonly for my own good, but that is quite underwhelming.

> We change the product constantly — we’re talking over 1,700 updates per year!

Good job, the new red is a huge improvement.

Meanwhile the YouTube comment sections are still getting pummeled by bots, trying to scam viewers with fake crypto offerings (90%+ involving an "Elon Musk giveaway") or writing entire threads praising the great investment returns from a genius trader named "Mr Definitely A. RealName" who operates only on WhatsApp.

Take a look at the comments under this video for example, all the references to AMZ6OP are for a scam crypto token that they pretend is being launched by Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRd_wNHJG4o.

I'm having doubts even reposting this link… please do not believe for a second that any of these claims are real.

I guess changing red to red-ish magenta was apparently more important than addressing the widespread issues that have been plaguing YouTube for years.

There's a big opportunity to build apolitical uncensored clone of YouTube. Current alternatives lack funding and don't function well