Welp! It appears as if Youtube will be forcing us to change to the One channel design on June 5th. They posted about it on their Youtube Creators blog here: [link]

If anyone of you is interested Youtube plans to take our possibility to design our backgrounds with this new upcoming layout (probably the REALLY awful one) : [link] (it rather fits for smartphones & tablets only, though and the way we currently promote ourself is already fine as it is.)

To stop this check out this video ; [link] and/or sign this petition : [link]

This new channel design is horrible! There is no background, there is nothing! YT gets worse every time : < Can we do something that did not make the appearance of this new channel?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I'm afraid that Youtube is going to change the channels again and take away the ability to make backgrounds.

Here's where they announced it: [link]
The followup article they made on it was this: [link]
All we're going to have after this change is the small banner image at the top like the channels you see linked in the above article. The guidelines indicate how much people will be able to see of the image depending on the device they use: [link]
So yeah... that's a really small image to work with.

I suppose it's still possible to design an icon and "Channel Art". But of course skinning a entire channel is out of the question.

I'm personally hoping that the channels are just in the beta stages and they'll offer us more design flexibility. But knowing Youtube's progression to uniformity lately, I doubt it.

Do you know if anyone has designs from the FIRST channel layout, not the 2nd 1 which came out in 09 or the Cosmic Stupid that came out last year? Vidicast and Wenoo use the original channel layout.