Pentagram puts Reddit's beloved mascot ‘Snoo’ at the heart of its brand refresh
After starting life as a humble sketch, Reddit’s beloved ‘Snoo’ character is realised in 3D in an eye-popping brand refresh by Pentagram.
The social media company enlisted Pentagram in late 2022, seeking brand strategy while preserving its signature sense of ‘conviviality and joy’ that reflects its ‘diverse and vibrant’ community.
Over the years, Reddit had amassed a vast array of visual and verbal components, including countless iterations of its beloved mascot, Snoo. The platform's terminology and intricate ‘upvote-downvote’ mechanisms added to the complexity of its brand identity.
The design team at Pentagram focused on refining the company's brand positioning. The result is a strategic description of Reddit as "the heart of the internet," playing up its brand traits such as ‘inherently eclectic, positively different, delightfully absurd, and genuinely candid’. These traits, along with Reddit's foundation as ‘the best place for real conversations’, became the guiding principles for the brand refresh.
A central element is the evolution of Snoo into a more iconic character. Pentagram transformed the existing 2D Snoo icon into a 3D form, akin to character design in animated films. This updated Snoo, along with a new menu of emoji-like Snoos, forms the basis for a new core illustration style, unifying the brand's visual identity.
The importance of comments in the Reddit universe led to the introduction of a ‘conversation bubble’ as the cornerstone of the brand's visual identity. Customising Reddit Sans, one of the company's proprietary typefaces, the design team turned lowercase letters into bubbles, creating a unique typographic style. The bubble, in turn, became a dynamic content device, framing both text and images and adapting to different content types.
Marrying the bubble with motion, Pentagram created a blueprint for motion design principles, allowing it to stretch, expand, and adapt, providing a codified way to organise and reveal content.
The brand refresh also includes a streamlined colour palette, with ‘OrangeRed’ remaining the signature brand colour, complemented by a refined secondary palette of 15 colours. This means that moderators will be provided with a new curated spectrum for customisation.
Our take
As a regular Reddit user, it’s been fun to see Snoo, and the various brand icons, gain organic traction among users. This brand identity thoughtfully underpins Reddit’s addictive, community-focused USP, so it made sense to enhance its importance and bring consistency to the design.
Pentagram’s work also brings a welcome ‘Pixar-esque’ character development to the brand’s undeniably cute mascot, making the collectibles and reward systems more fun and meaningful, while simultaneously managing to make it feel less cluttered.
In a world where rarity, exclusivity and identity building are becoming more vital for online social kudos, Reddit’s system, unlike a lot of NFT-based reward systems, is genuinely valued. The company has also done well to make a greater feature of its brand colour, which really sticks out among social media platforms.
Credits
Client: Reddit
Sector: Technology
Discipline: Brand Identity
Office: New York
Partner: Natasha Jen
Project team: Whitney Badge, Kyle Barron-Cohen, Eva Green, Edgar Ferrer, Justin Zhang, Weronika Rafa, Jack Fahnestock, Max Zimmerer, Madeleine Golden, Zoë Thompson, Juliette Lespérance, Mason Lin
Collaborators: Jang Hyun Han, Stephen Hutchings, Dave Carr
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