YouTube has been hard at work on a new YouTube theme to make keeping track of your subscriptions easier. The new theme is a major upgrade from the unprofessional looking design of the old theme. The newest theme is a division of its beta theme, Cosmic Panda.

The new theme features a slightly grey textured background that’s designed to be easier on the eyes when they’re staring at the webpage for long amounts of time. The whole theme gets a major upgrade with newly styled buttons to give it a more rustic look. Notifications and elements within the webpage give a friendly look and feel to the page over the lifeless buttons that made up the old theme. The size of the icons have also been increased and, where applicable, they are much higher quality for those who like HD images.

If you haven’t gotten the theme yet, we have a solution for you so that you can try it out. Since this theme seems to be popping up on multiple people’s YouTube accounts, including mine, this is likely to be the new look of YouTube over the beta Cosmic Panda theme. A lot of the elements of Cosmic Panda can be seen within this unified design; over all, it’s a spectacular improvement. The only element that seems unchanged is the design to channel pages, which still look the same under the new layout.

To get this new theme, you’ll need a Web browser that comes with a developer console, like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, to add a line of data into the user agent to change a cookie; this forces YouTube to give you the new theme design.

Log in to YouTube with your account information. YouTube gives you a unique cookie when you log in and we’ll be changing this.

Open the developer console in your browser. Your operating system will determine how the developer console will be accessed. In Chrome on Windows it’s Ctrl + Shift + J and on OS X it’s Command + Option + J. If you’re using Firefox you can use Ctrl + Shift + K for Windows and Command + Shift + K on OS X.

Navigate to the console section. Under Google Chrome it’s a tab that you’ll have to click; on Mozilla Firefox you’ll already have it pulled up. You want to enter the following string of code exactly as you see here and press enter: document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=ST1Ti53r4fU";

Close the console and refresh the page. Now close the console and refresh the page; you’ll notice that after the refresh, the new theme will be enabled for you and it’ll run you through a quick guide on the new theme and how to use it to its fullest.

At first the new layout may seem a bit more busy than it was, but you’ll quickly get used to it and it won’t seem as overwhelming as it first seems. I’ve had fun with the new theme and think it’s a major improvement over the old dull theme. What do you think of the new theme?