For those who weren’t already shopping for the Reddit IPO rumors, the web’s beating coronary heart of deeply area of interest microcultures simply launched a rebrand, refreshing its iconic emblem and rolling out some new visible vibes.
Reddit’s most evident visible replace is a brand new design for Snoo, the anthropomorphic purple and white robotic mascot synonymous with Reddit since its earliest days.
Picture Credit: Reddit
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 might have a look at dwelling 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 purple chat bubble — is already reside as the brand and favicon on Reddit’s company web site. We’re beginning to see the brand new emblem on Reddit.com as properly, 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 school on the College of Virginia. (Ohanian, who beforehand served as Reddit CEO, stepped down from the corporate’s board of administrators three years in the past to open the board as much as extra racial range.)
Past the Snoo glow-up, Reddit can 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, will probably be open supply and extensively obtainable on-line.
“As we increase our world presence into new markets and have interaction with extra audiences from advertisers and builders to redditors and moderators, we have to strengthen our model basis to permit for extra artistic and constant expression,” Reddit chief advertising and marketing and shopper expertise officer Roxy Younger mentioned. “Our objective stays to deal with redditors’ wants and make it easier to deliver neighborhood, belonging, and empowerment to everybody on the planet.”
The corporate can be increasing its shade horizons past the basic 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 shade into the platform and its apps.
The timing won’t be a coincidence. It’s straightforward to neglect that Reddit, a longtime helpful nook of the social web isn’t already a public firm like lots of its friends. Reddit endured a rocky 2023 after waging conflict with its personal developer neighborhood, a protracted combat that noticed many subreddits — Reddit’s core interest-based communities — go darkish in protest.
Now that the drama has cooled off, Bloomberg stories that Reddit could also be on monitor for an IPO that might 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 definitely hints that huge information for Reddit could possibly be proper across the nook.