Pentagram New York’s Natasha Jen Team
Reddit, now in the process of pursuing an IPO worth up to $5 billion, recently introduced a brand refresh by
Pentagram New York partner Natasha Jen’s team.
Business Insider has called Reddit’s planned March IPO “one of the most anticipated of 2024.” Pentagram was introduced to the project in late 2022; its brief was to create a more powerful and cohesive visual identity that would reflect social media platform’s elevated place among the top 20 most-visited sites in the world while maintaining Reddit’s creative and edgy spirit.
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The brand refresh has transformed alien mascot, Snoo, into a 3D character; updated and simplified the color palette; and introduced both a new Reddit Sans custom font family and a flexible bubble graphic.
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During the strategy phase, the design team identified four key Reddit ‘traits’, which in turn informed the brand strategy and visual assets: “inherently eclectic, positively different, delightfully absurd, and genuinely candid.” From there, Pentagram distilled Reddit down to “the heart of the internet.”
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Snoo is now a 3D icon, displays opposable thumbs and has a malleable face. A new menu of emoji-esque Snoos are said to “open the door for the character’s next act.” Orange-red remains the signature brand color but the designers simplified the palette from more than 100 shades down to 15. As for typography, Pentagram customized Reddit Sans by turning the rounded counter forms of lowercase letters into bubbles. This, in turn, led to the creation of Reddit Display, a custom typeface that brings the bubble motif to headlines and large-scale typography – and the introduction of a conversation bubble, able to adapt and shapeshift, as a key graphic element.
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A key challenge, according to Pentagram, involved navigating the complexities of Reddit’s terminology, such as its ‘r/’ prefix for subreddits, and the content rating process in which users either up- or down-vote content, dictating how widely posts are seen.
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