YouTube KidsCopied

YouTube Kids launched to give families a curated way to watch together, as YouTube's Neal Mohan put it. On 29 August 2017 Mohan announced a broad YouTube overhaul: a Material Design desktop, new mobile features, and a refreshed logo and icon. The updated logo, he wrote, combined a cleaned up wordmark with the icon to create a more flexible design that works better across devices, even on the tiniest screens, and would roll out across mobile and desktop that day and across all other apps and services soon.

YouTube Kids followed immediately. 9to5Google's Abner Li reported on 30 August that the app also received revamped branding the previous day. The old icon had cleverly turned the tube into a character with a smiling face. Google dropped that character and used a hand drawn version of the main logo instead, in a brighter shade of red, jaunty and crooked with no smooth lines. On iOS and on Android 7.1 and later, the icon sat on a white background that matched YouTube's new stark white look. It arrived in version 2.28.14 on Android and 2.34.7 on iOS.

Li did not like it. The headline said it looked like it was drawn by a kid, and he wrote that the icon loses a great deal of character and cuteness, that he only somewhat saw the logic of children being drawn to something resembling their own scribbles, and that kids deserve nicely designed things as much as adults.

He was right. The smiling tube was a genuine idea: it made the YouTube play button into a friend, which is exactly what a children's app wants. The scribble replaces an idea with a style, and a condescending one, since children draw crookedly because they are learning, not because they prefer it. The redesign does serve brand consistency, linking the kids app visibly to the new parent logo, and the brighter red matches Mohan's brightened icon. But consistency was the parent's goal, not the child's. This is a case where the system won and the product lost something lovable. Li even closed his piece by asking readers to poll their own children, which is the right audience to judge a children's icon, and one that rarely gets a vote in a corporate refresh.