Plakat
Plakat — a Chrome extension for YouTubeNº 001 · free on GitHub

your feed,
redrawn as
posters.

Plakat turns every YouTube thumbnail and channel avatar into a generative poster. Each channel gets its own series — Swiss, Bauhaus, Constructivist, ’60s jazz or Ma 間 — and every video is a new variant of it.

Get it on GitHub See the five styles

Runs entirely in your browser. No account, no tracking.

A collage of generated posters: a Swiss poster with a giant red 5, a Constructivist Short reading Every channel is a series, a Ma poster with a single red circle, and two round channel avatars

01 — Flip the switch

Same feed. A different wall.

Press Alt+Shift+P on YouTube to switch between the originals and the posters. Hover any poster or avatar to peek at what is underneath.

A YouTube feed with Plakat on: four videos as posters in Ma, Constructivist, Jazz and Swiss styles, each with a matching channel avatar

02 — Five styles

Five design traditions. Each channel gets one.

Szwajcarski

Swiss

A grid, grotesque type and one loud gesture: a giant episode number, a circle or concentric rings. Titles run lowercase and flush left under a hairline with the channel and a serial number.

Avatar
A monogram beside a quarter circle in the channel’s accent.
Typeface
Inter Tight
Palette
One of six palettes, fixed for this channel.
Swiss poster for a video by Design Talks
A second Swiss poster from the same channel, a variant of the same series
Design Talks avatar in the Swiss style Design Talks
Swiss poster for a Short by Design Talks

03 — How it works

Seeded, so a channel always looks like itself.

The channel picks the series

A random generator seeded with the channel chooses the style, the palette and the traits of the series: the layout, a vocabulary of shapes, a tilt.

Every video is a variant

A second generator, seeded with the video, moves and sizes things. The title is read too: episode numbers become giant numerals, the strongest word becomes the headline.

The avatar joins the series

Avatars next to videos, in search, in your subscriptions, on the watch page and in channel headers share the channel’s palette and forms. Comment authors keep their faces.

Design Talks avatar, Swiss style Kanał Techniczny avatar, Bauhaus style Rozmowy o biznesie avatar, Constructivist style Blue Note Hour avatar, Jazz style Slow Kyoto avatar, Ma style

Five channels, five series. The circle beside a title always matches the poster above it.

04 — Make it yours

Pin it, reroll it, or design your own.

  • Pin a style to any channel you have seen.
  • Reroll a channel for a new palette and composition.
  • Build your own style: engine, typeface, case, composition, density and palettes, previewed on the channel’s real titles.
  • Share styles as JSON.

The settings are in Polish for now.

The Plakat options page: each channel you have seen, with its avatar, three posters on its real titles, a style picker and a reroll button

05 — Install

hang the posters in a minute.

  1. Clone or download the repository from GitHub.
  2. Open chrome://extensions and turn on Developer mode.
  3. Click Load unpacked and pick the folder with manifest.json.
  4. Open YouTube. Alt+Shift+P toggles the posters.
git clone https://github.com/MBratkowski/plakat.git Open on GitHub

Not in the Chrome Web Store yet.