YouTube is rolling out a huge redesign to both its desktop and mobile applications, doing away with clutter, re-imagining its logo and instituting other changes including allowing users to play vertical videos in full screen on their smartphone.

Some of the changes had already rolled out to a limited amount of people that could test them before the release, but the roll-out starts for everyone today.


The change in the logo design is probably the one that will be easiest to notice and the one that will affect content creators the least: the red focus circle on the 'Tube' part of YouTube is no longer there.

Instead the red YouTube play button now stands ahead of a black YouTube text logo.


WE HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ADAPT THE EXPERIENCE TO BEST SUIT THE DEVICE AND CONTEXT IN WHICH PEOPLE ARE CONSUMING IT
But it is the newly added support for vertical video that will make tons of smartphone videos much more enjoyable to watch. To pull this off, YouTube has introduced a new adaptive video player that adjusts to different video formats, including vertical videos.

One of the things we all collectively hated was the black bars,” YouTube’s VP of product management Manual Bronstein said. “A small picture and black bars.
And that was exactly the case with vertical videos in the past: since YouTube was originally designed back when landscape video was the norm, vertical videos were displayed as a tiny portion of the screen with black bars on the sides, wasting a huge space of a phone display. This update changes that for good.


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