When Reddit sought a more cohesive, user-friendly, and globally resonant identity, it turned to design royalty Pentagram.
Preserving Reddit’s innate creativity stood as the cornerstone of the redesign process, focusing on refining the company’s brand positioning. Reddit boasts a distinctive authenticity reflected in its platform’s unique features and iconic alien mascot, Snoo. Moreover, Reddit thrives on its curious, informed, and engaged community. With these elements in mind, Pentagram aligned the updated brand with four core attributes: inherent eclecticism, positive distinctiveness, delightful absurdity, and genuine candor.
These traits, coupled with Reddit’s empowering essence as a hub for genuine conversations, culminated in a strategic redefinition: Reddit as “the heart of the internet.” I had the pleasure of speaking with Natasha Jen, partner at Pentagram and design lead for the Reddit brand refresh, who shared the team’s insightful approach with me.
The most important thing that designers need to consider is to put the brand in a more time-based context. It’s not just about this moment in time. It’s about how you take what is most essential of the brand and then how you evolve it, but you have to stick to the spirit.
Natasha Jen, Partner at Pentagram
(Conversation edited for brevity and clarity.)
Having to synthesize years of Reddit collateral must have been quite an undertaking. You had to unite hundreds of pieces. How did your team initially approach this streamlining?
First, we had to identify the spirit of Reddit. What is their ethos? What’s driving them now, and what drove them in the past? What is driving them forward? Once we identified those big ideas, combing through the collateral became easier because we had guardrails. That guidance helped us determine what was valuable, a maybe, and what needed to go into the garbage.
We understood the Reddit brand traits very clearly. They are eclectic. They are different. They want to be positive. They’re delightful and absurd. As a Redditor myself, I see the absurdest move throughout the experience. That was very apparent to me. They’re also candid. They’re real. These traits infuse in everything Reddit does.
These traits informed a very specific brand: Snoo is critical. Why? Because Snoo is eclectic. Snoo is adorable. Snoo is the character that holds a lot of these brand attributes. We needed to keep Snoo, but we also had to give it a rebirth so that Snoo could live in the future, embodying these qualities so specific and true to Reddit.
Identifying the importance of Snoo and its emotional range, did this lead you to the new strategic description of Reddit as the “heart of the internet”? What else led you to this discovery?
Reddit is where people participate and contribute to create this massive knowledge base. It’s a knowledge base because people discuss things and contribute to the content. Each subreddit is an in-depth discussion of people who are passionate about that subject matter. Calling it “the heart of the internet” foregrounds Reddit’s humanness. It’s a hugely and purely human platform. You can’t do that with AI. Reddit does not use algorithms to rank things. The ranking is all done by upvoting and downvoting. That’s total democracy by the people. Changing “The front page of the internet” to “The heart of the internet” conveys a similar mindset. It’s just that we humanized the platform a lot more.
With this diverse and active user base, ensuring that the brand nods to the aspects that have made it familiar to existing users, how will the refreshed brand resonate and potentially attract new users to the platform?
I can hope for the best because I know how much effort has gone into simplifying to attract a new user base. Reddit has many unique features that can be overwhelming to anyone new. Two examples are understanding what r/ means and the upvote/downvote feature.
Reddit has made significant changes to streamline the user experience, particularly for those new to the platform. While this involved simplifying some more elaborate features that long-time users found awesome and playful, our intention was to create a more welcoming and less overwhelming environment for newcomers. Through Reddit’s thoughtful simplification process, the nature of the platform is still true, but it has become a lot easier for anybody to understand and use. Our job was to honor the simplification effort that started long before Reddit hired us to rebrand.
Would you say that’s the secret sauce for any major brand refresh, just simplification?
No, I don’t think so. Simplification can be over-reductive. The key for any rebrand is to truly understand and solidify brand attributes, which must reflect a brand’s ethos. You have to figure out the personality of the organization, be it a product, service, or group of people. What are the brand traits? And you have to bring that spirit into the new era. That’s how every iconic brand evolves. Think about Disney—the time when Walt Disney drew Mickey Mouse was a very different media landscape to today. Disney is one of the world’s most admired and loved media companies. What stays true is the spirit of adventure, fun, and loving, all these wonderful attributes that Disney embodies.