YouTube's New Desktop Design Makes Site Faster, Cleaner, Offers Dark Theme For Night Owls

For YouTube’s 12th birthday, the platform is getting a redesigning its desktop design, making it faster and cleaner.

YouTube introduced the site’s “clean, simple design” Tuesday and is encouraging users to try the new look.

Read: Streaming vs. Live TV: Teens Spend Significantly More Time On YouTube, Netflix Than Traditional Media

What’s New in YouTube’s Recent Design?

The new look highlights your favorite videos and YouTubers. The menu sports a smaller font size and can be hidden, which means you’ll be able to see more videos instead of the menu taking up space on the side of the screen. The new design includes three main sections at the top of the menu: home, trending and subscriptions, which is then followed by your library and a list of channels to which you subscribe.

With the new design, YouTube suggests a list of never-ending video recommendations from channels to which you subscribe and clips you might like.

YouTube’s new look takes advantage of Google’s design language, Material Design, TechCrunch reported, which makes the site cleaner and more consistent with the YouTube app across gadgets. The new look is also built on Polymer, an open source JavaScript library that makes the site faster. Polymer allows developers to create reusable web components.

“Things that get built once can then be reapplied more quickly,” Manuel Bronstein, vice president of product management at YouTube, told TechCrunch about Polymer. “It’s less about a particular feature, and it’s more about the velocity of which things can be brought to market. This then enables us to explore and then do more things.”

YouTube’s New Dark Theme

The latest design also comes with a “dark theme” that turns the page dark and cuts down on glare to “take in the true colors” of the clips you watch. The dark mode should help out for those who like staying up at night watching YouTube videos. To activate dark theme, first you have opt-in to try YouTube’s new look by going to youtube.com/new and clicking go to YouTube. Once you’re using the new design, go to settings on the upper right-hand corner and switch dark theme on.

Read: YouTube TV Launches In Select Cities, Just $35 A Month

Sending Feedback to YouTube and Switching Back to Classic Site

YouTube is working on new features and is basing its alterations on what users think of the recent look. You can send feedback to YouTube on what you like or don’t by going to the account menu and selecting send feedback.

More features are planned, YouTube said.

“We're still working on it, but we can't wait for you to try it out and let us know what you think!” YouTube said Tuesday.

If you try the new look and don’t like it, you can switch back to the traditional YouTube site by going to your account settings and clicking on restore classic YouTube.