Pirate Lifestyle

About December 1st the YouTube Team launched the new Homepage, new Channels, and a new overall design.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/12/get-more-into-what-you-love-on-youtube.html

Many partners have been playing around with the new design for several weeks, using Cosmic Panda and more recently Channels_Preview.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/12/get-more-into-what-you-love-on-youtube.html

Obviously the change is coming, maybe in a few weeks, but definitely within a month or two. So last week I began to seriously play with the new design. It is easy (now) to opt-in and opt-out of the new design and I figured I might as well get used to it before we have no choice!

Note: when you opt-in to the new design everyone visiting your channel will see the new design.

Attached is an image of my new design and my old design.

As you see, my old background was a photo of water and had a half-dozen photo images, three per side. By any standard it was busy, looked best on 1366 pixel or smaller monitors, but this was the norm at the time.

As I played around most of last week attempting to create a background for the new channel design, I was very frustrated. No matter how much I tried, I was very unhappy with how cluttered my channel looked. I realized I was trying to bring the old to the new.

After looking at a few other partner channels that have switched over to the new channel design, I noticed they were all using a simple and clean design. I realized the way to go was a simpler background that doesn’t compete with the focus of the channel, the videos. So, I went with a simple feathered background, a dark-blue background that will look good on any sized monitor and a brighter light blue that draws your eyes to the featured video.

I used the same banner on my new channel design background as I had on my old design. On the new design the banner is part of the background and it is not a separate image. So now I have a bright, clean, and simple channel background.

Here is my Partner Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/PirateLifestyleTV

What do you think of my new channel design?

Have you switched to the new design?

What does your background look like?

Click here to subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=PirateLifestyleTV *** Don't be missin' a show. Thank you!

CaptRob