Reddit refreshes its brand as IPO hypothesis swirls

For those who 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 brand 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 to be very slick. The brand new mascot replaces the flat design of the earlier Snoo with a 3 dimensional model of the character that might have a look at residence 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 brand — a disembodied Snoo head in a purple chat bubble — is already stay as the brand and favicon on Reddit’s company web site. We’re beginning to see the brand new brand on Reddit.com as effectively, 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 a.ok.a. /u/kn0thing initially created Snoo as 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 variety.)

Past the Snoo glowup, 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 identification as a spot for “conversations.” One of many typefaces, Reddit Sans, might be open supply and broadly obtainable 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 Client Expertise Officer Roxy Younger mentioned. “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 basic reddish orange (apparently generally known as OrangeRed) that Reddit is understood for. A set of latest colours generally 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 lots 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 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 actually hints that huge information for Reddit could possibly be proper across the nook.