In the event you weren’t already buying the Reddit IPO rumors, the web’s beating coronary heart of deeply niche microcultures simply launched a rebrand, refreshing its iconic emblem and rolling out some new visible vibes.
Reddit’s most blatant visible replace is a brand new design for Snoo, the anthropomorphic crimson and white robotic mascot synonymous with Reddit since its earliest days.
In comparison with the now-ancient preliminary model of Snoo, the brand new Snoo seems very slick. The brand new mascot replaces the flat design of the earlier Snoo with a three-dimensional model of the character that would have a look at house in a Pixar film. Snoo, who’s genderless, additionally scored opposable thumbs within the redesign course of together with an open-mouthed smile.
The brand new emblem — a disembodied Snoo head in a crimson chat bubble — is already stay as the emblem and favicon on Reddit’s company web site. We’re beginning to see the brand new emblem on Reddit.com as nicely, together with some wonky habits like damaged feedback. (TechCrunch has reached out to the corporate to ask if the problems are associated to the rebrand’s rollout.)
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, aka /u/kn0thing, initially created Snoo as a sketch whereas he was nonetheless in faculty on the College of Virginia. (Ohanian, who beforehand served as govt chairman of Reddit, stepped down from the corporate’s board of administrators three years in the past to open it as much as extra racial range.)
Past the Snoo glow-up, Reddit can also be refreshing its typefaces with a brand new authentic set of fonts meant to evoke chat bubbles, a visible trace at Reddit’s self-styled id as a spot for “conversations.” One of many typefaces, Reddit Sans, shall be open supply and extensively out there on-line.
“As we expand our global presence into new markets and engage with more audiences from advertisers and developers to redditors and moderators, we need to strengthen our brand foundation to allow for more creative and consistent expression,” Reddit chief advertising and marketing and shopper expertise officer Roxy Younger stated. “Our goal remains to focus on redditors’ needs and make it simpler to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world.”
The corporate can also be increasing its colour horizons past the traditional reddish orange (apparently often known as OrangeRed) that Reddit is thought for. A set of recent colours often known as GuavaPink, LimeGreen, BananaYellow, and JuniperBlue will pop up in designs, bringing extra colour into the platform and its apps.
The timing won’t be a coincidence. It’s straightforward to overlook that Reddit, a longtime helpful nook of the social web isn’t already a public firm like a lot of its friends. Reddit endured a rocky 2023 after waging war with its own developer community, a protracted struggle that noticed many subreddits — Reddit’s core interest-based communities — go darkish in protest.
Now that the drama has cooled off, Bloomberg reports that Reddit could also be on observe for an IPO that would land as quickly as the primary quarter of 2024. The corporate’s curiosity in going public has been effervescent up for years now so take that with a grain of salt, however a conspicuously timed model refresh actually hints that massive information for Reddit could possibly be proper across the nook.