YouTube’s New Hue

Anyone who’s been online has been on YouTube. What began in 2005 as a quirky idea for a video-dating site has since exploded into a global powerhouse of a media platform. Today, billions tune in daily to watch everything from cat videos to cooking tutorials, gaming marathons to music performances.

For most of its lifespan, YouTube’s brand has been associated with its iconic red logo. But a few months ago, users began to notice a new, softer shade of red across the site — plus a surprising magenta gradient in hallmark features like the video progress bar. It’s a subtle but meaningful shift.

So why did YouTube change color? In honor of YouTube’s 20th birthday, we asked key members of the art direction and design teams why and how they did it. Here, they discuss how to keep a beloved brand feeling fresh, the power of color in brand identity, the challenges of choosing the right shade, and how accessibility considerations and motion design played a part in their process.

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

• Robyn Lee — Visual Design Lead
• Amy Yip — Visual Design Lead
• Jessie Zo — Senior Visual Designer
• David Amichai — Senior Motion Designer
• Tom Moran — Visual Design Lead
• Linda Hong — Product Manager

Robyn: Our refresh journey began by pinpointing YouTube’s most outdated elements through research.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. It was a big step forward but not a leap! We wanted an evolution, not a revolution. Red, core to YouTube's identity, demanded a delicate touch. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we aimed to refine it.

Tom: We change the product constantly — we’re talking over 1,700 updates per year! — but users don’t notice incremental changes. We found that if you bundle valuable features with visual design changes, people notice that the product has evolved.

There was a great opportunity here not just to revisit color, but to think about how color is used in our product to create a cohesive experience. We could leverage color to support the iconic moments in our product, like the “smash the like” button and the “subscribe to my channel” button.

Robyn: We've had many reds during 20 years of YouTube’s existence. The most recent change happened in 2017 and it was pure red in the RGB system, which we knew had problems. For instance, it’s perceived to be too loud when implemented in key UI moments. It rendered orange on certain screens. It caused burn-in issues on TVs, which is when the screen becomes permanently discolored because pure colors create more burden over time. Those technical issues were easy targets.

Jessie: By adjusting to a slightly cooler shade, we resolved the technical issues and added an approachable, vibrant personality. We wanted to honor YouTube’s legacy while modernizing it.

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

Amy: For better or worse, red is a very strong color that has been synonymous with a lot of different movements throughout history, and it has different meanings in different societies. In order to develop our new color, we had to ask ourselves: does this still reflect our brand? To answer that, we started with YouTube’s mission to “Give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Next, to help us evaluate the color, the new red had to embody our creative principles: welcoming, engaging, dynamic, and unified.

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 exist 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.

Jessie: Once we landed on magenta we explored different hues and tones — is it more coral-ish or purple-ish or orange-ish? The magenta we chose surprised users right away, but it’s a good stepping stone for evolving even more in the future.

Amy: We didn’t want to paint the town red! Red is synonymous with YouTube, but if it’s used everywhere, its power is diluted. The red should be special and unique and limited to specific areas.

Robyn: Red is a powerful color, so we created a framework that outlines how and where to apply our brand colors, focusing on key areas like brand marks, identity elements, and signature UI moments. We thoughtfully selected these moments to embody YouTube’s goal: to help people discover content, connect with their community, and spark creativity.

To ensure platform-wide consistency, we shared this framework with all UX teams, empowering them to identify UI moments within their specific product areas. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with everyone embracing the new strategy. You'll see this vibrant new red in our logo and product icons, and the gradient makes appearances in elements like topic icons, the progress bar, the like and subscribe buttons, the premium badge, and the live ring.

Jessie: Whenever we do a design exploration, we try to see all the colors within actual mocks. We’re mindful of all surfaces, from small ones like logos to big ones like marketing campaigns. Even though it looks like such a simple change, we spent months doing a deep audit of each product and conducting interviews with all the designers, directors, product managers, and engineers.

Through those conversations, we identified the problems of the old red and learned how to apply the new red and the gradient. For instance, we caught a few potential issues rendering the gradient on large screens, and found ways to keep the red versatile to meet accessibility needs.

David: YouTube is a video platform. It’s based in motion. As our technical capabilities increase, it’s becoming easier to integrate motion into the product in ways that feel more seamless. For example, we can use it to guide the eye in use cases like navigation. Motion is a big component of marketing too, and being able to have parity in motion assets within product and marketing makes the brand feel more alive.

With our color update, motion allows us to express our brand in discreet ways that are only present in motion. Our startup animation is the logo expanding and contracting with the YouTube playbar. In this update, we introduced the gradient into the animation, for an extra branded punch. We also made the bar a little quicker and thinner to feel more modern, and shortened the duration of the animation by .2 seconds.

Linda: Adding a gradient to the progress bar was a Jessie idea that ended up turning into something really beautiful!

Jessie: Before, we used a secondary palette with a whole rainbow of colors for our topic channel icons. We decided to dial back their colorfulness, and now they use the red-to-magenta gradient. When we take away the playfulness through colors, we can add it through motion. Thanks to David, all the topic channel icons now have a delightful animation.

David: Adding the gradient opened up new possibilities as well. With a single color, we can only add animation by changing the actual form of that object. With a gradient, we can use more subtle animations and create ambiance in a less intrusive way.

Tom: Over the last several years we’ve put huge effort into elevating creators’ content, and bringing some life and playfulness through motion makes it more human and inviting. But adding features is always a balancing act. It’s the sugar test: You don’t want to give everybody so much sugar that they get sick, but you want to have those little moments of delight where there’s a reward. The changes are not overpowering, but there is a definite presence of color and motion throughout the product experience.

Jessie: Ensuring sufficient contrast between text and background is a primary consideration. When we developed the new red and magenta hues, we created light, medium, and dark variations to accommodate different use cases. For smaller components like the premium badge and live avatar ring, we use slightly darker shades of red and magenta to meet the minimum contrast ratio requirement of 4.5:1.

Another important consideration was avoiding color as the sole means of conveying information. For instance, instead of applying branded colors to all buttons, we reserve them to highlight key actions a user might take. This approach keeps default states in monochromatic tones, maximizing both efficiency and accessibility.

Linda: We meet with the accessibility team when we pitch broad feature sets like this. For motion assets, we have an adaptive framework in place within the main app, which means we can scale the experience based on how high-performance the user’s device is. That’s not necessarily something people think about with accessibility, but higher-end phones can handle a lot more animation and movement. For example, we didn’t introduce the new startup animation to lower-end devices because it would make their performance worse.

David: This thinking extends into how we approach motion as a whole. We try very hard to build features that are adaptive to individuals’ needs. As an example, our motion language is designed to account for different screen sizes and limit jarring movements to avoid overwhelming users or making them feel nauseated.

Linda: We always test our updates to see whether it creates a “modern perception lift” — does it look more modernized? We’ve had a really good track record over the last two years, and we expect a lift from the new color changes. We’re eager to keep renewing other foundational parts of our design system with the next launch.

Tom: I don’t know how you put into words all of the tremendous thought and energy behind the scenes that goes into presenting something to our users. There’s a kind of secret sauce that goes into what users see on a daily basis.

Amy: Updating our brand color was a significant step, but it's just the beginning. We’re strategically reimagining every element of our visual system: imagery, iconography, typography, secondary color palettes, and much more. YouTube’s content is dynamic and ever-changing, and our visual system needs to keep up to stay fresh, engaging, and relevant.