Ches Wajda — Designer of the YouTube Play Button

selected work

Joined a one-year-old network as its first design hire and led the redesign — secondary nav, multi-column layouts, the “Jobs” feature, and the profile-completeness mechanic.

YouTube Player

YouTube “play” button & video chrome

Designed the original Flash video player — controls, timeline, volume — and the iconic play button, now part of the formal logo.

NonFriction

Design studio, volunteered to non-profits and charities — brand, product, and technology as a holistic system.

Logos

A portfolio of logo and identity marks — wordmarks, monograms, and symbols drawn across twenty years of brand work.

Type Design

ITC Styleboy & Posterboy for Monotype; a historical family for the American Battle Monuments Commission.

Shepard Museum

A website and digital archive for modernist Otis Shepard, built from my own collection.

Crankcase Synthetic

Human-forward, AI-enabled video content agency — the sister studio to NonFriction.

about

25 years designing the products, brands, and type that people engage with every day.

I work best at the intersection of product design, brand mark design, and typography. Leveraging all three in concert with various technologies helps an interface’s touch points line up — a mark that reinforces the product, and vice versa.

Some of the work I’ve collaborated on has outlasted its moment. LinkedIn’s “profile completeness” mechanic is now a standard UX pattern, taught at Stanford’s d.school. YouTube’s visual design, player, and “play” button were just acquired by the V&A Museum in London in 2026.

Today I still take on product, brand, and type commissions through my studio NonFriction, and create content through Crankcase Synthetic. I also and work at AI video startup EyeTell as a designer.

More about me →

Ches Wajda — designer of the YouTube “play” button and video player, product designer, brand mark designer, and type designer