YouTube unleashes Cosmic Panda

YouTube has unveiled the slightly trippy Cosmic Panda (man), in an attempt to boost the experience of viewing and sharing videos, playlists and channels. The redesign appears to follow Gmail in presenting a slicker, modern take on interface design that also happens to be touch-friendly and therefore suitable for the huge number of iPads and other tablets being sold worldwide. The darker background behind videos ensures what you’re watching is more prominent, videos can be resized on-the-fly, and playlist thumbnails are helpfully displayed in a scrollable list underneath the main video. Additionally, the redesign offers more pages and superior editing tools for customising channels.

On its blog, YouTube states that its team is “constantly experimenting, tweaking and playing with new ways to make your experience exactly what you’re looking for”, and the company says that it is “eager to hear your feedback as it’s a great chance for us to incorporate your ideas into future designs for YouTube”. You should be able to do this by clicking the blue Feedback tab at the side of the screen, although this wasn’t working reliably at the time of writing. YouTube also adds that if you dislike the experimental site, you can return to the original by clicking the ‘older version’ link in the intro blurb of the Cosmic Panda entry page.

(Note that when checking out the site ourselves on a Mac devoid of Flash, we also had to ‘rejoin’ the HTML5 trial to get any videos to play.)