Lindsay Stuart • Jun 14th, 2022
Reddit is a network of over 100K active communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies, and passions. Founded in 2005, over the last 17 years the company has grown into a platform that’s used and loved by people all over the world, averaging more than 50 million daily active users. We caught up with Reddit’s Head of Design, Lowell Goss, and Head of Brand Creative Tavish MacLellan to learn more about Reddit’s approach to branding, creative collaboration, and more.
Head of Design Lowell Goss spends his time working with people and companies to make the world more fun, easier to understand and more accessible. During the last sixteen years, Lowell has designed innovative products, built super talented teams, and used design thinking to drive change at Reddit, Amazon, LendingClub and Yahoo!, as well as clients including Dialpad, Ford and Comcast.
As both a creative director and product designer, Head of Brand Creative Tavish MacLellan has over a decade of experience directing teams to create innovative and thoughtful experiences. Working early with startups like Reddit and Thrillist, as well as mature companies like HP, Samsung, Google and Nordstrom, he has designed everything from identities and advertising to social and mobile applications, as well as games.
LG: My creative adventure started with music and photography. Growing up in rural Indiana I had no idea that people paid you for making pictures, or stories. I was too practical to try being a rock star. So I went to film school. Moving to NYC was a sensory shock.
Film school was followed by grad school at ITP in 1995. I didn’t know it then, but my timing was perfect. In 1995 the tech world was obsessed with VR, high speed cable, and 3D. By the next summer the web had started to pop. High bandwidth applications were put aside in favor of HTML. Every company wanted to be online. And suddenly everyone had a job.
Post school was a whirlwind. Viacom. Then CitySearch. NYC > LA > Austin. I landed at Frog Design’s Austin office. A typical Frog project might include identity, branding, sound design, engineering, industrial design and video. Frog was an incredible place to learn. And to meet incredible people.
Over the next 20 years I weathered the dot com crash, starting building and leading teams at Amazon, Yahoo, Telenav and LendingClub, and in 2019 landed at Reddit.
TM: Always interested in drawing and art, I started to experiment with HTML in Notepad at the end of high school, and that ended up translating to working in web design during University in the late 90’s and early 2000’s in Montreal, Canada. By 2006 I had tackled identities, directed music videos, studied typography, and re-architected websites for a variety of clients, many of them forgotten startups, with occasional notable clients like Thrillist and Labatt.
In 2007, I moved to San Francisco to work for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, where I had the opportunity to work on the HP account. There, I art directed ads and ended up working on a full identity refresh, from logo design to packaging to re-architecting and designing hp.com. Moving on to Method Inc. (the design consultancy, not the soap company) I continued to work on identities and was introduced to the new notion of interactive ‘product design’ for clients like Google and Samsung.
A couple of SF startups later, I was fully immersed in product design for apps and games, and through a co-worker I was introduced to the team at Reddit, which in 2014 was a small operation based out of the Wired Magazine building. Eight eventful years later I’ve worn many hats at Reddit, but importantly had the chance to work on the Reddit identity, the design of the app at launch, modernizing our mascot Snoo, and more. It’s always exciting to see how far we have come.
LG: Pre-pandemic, my days were mostly about co-creating with the designers in real-time. Post-pandemic has shifted considerably. Most days are kind of like an eight hour video call-in show with new guests every thirty minutes. Tools like Slack, Figma, and Figjam allow us to recapture the energy of co-creation despite being physically apart.
TM: I don’t know that there is a typical day anymore, but since we are a largely remote team, most of my days are packed with video meetings. Generally, I’ll start the day by answering questions and giving feedback to my team on Slack, largely to those of us who are operating on East Coast time in North America, or in Europe. A lot of this is discussions around the execution of creative and whether they are adhering to our brand attributes and guidelines. Mornings are generally a good time to get some design work done as well, though that part of my role is a rarity now that I work with such a talented team. Then, afternoons are packed with video calls - reviews of creative projects and kick-offs for new projects, as well as meetings with other teams and individuals I work with. There are always interesting challenges to address.
LG: Reddit is ultimately about the community. Our moderators, users and creators are the stars. The job of the product brand is to support what they’re doing. The resulting aesthetic is authentic. Reddit is more punk rock than disco, more DIY than haute couture.
The interesting challenge, I think, is to maintain Reddit’s authenticity while simultaneously making it easier to use and easier to understand. Reddit started as a text-based website that you accessed from a browser on a computer. That’s not really how most people access the internet anymore. The modern internet is filled with moving pictures, sound, emojis and chat. The modern internet is in your pocket. The project is to preserve Reddit’s focus on community and belonging while making it accessible to new users, younger users and international users.
TM: To Lowell’s point, Reddit has always been about our community. One of our brand attributes, “Eclectic,” is there in part because it describes the DIY approach our users have always taken to branding their own communities on the platform. When I arrived at Reddit, the visual language was what our CEO Steve Huffman would later describe as a “dystopian craigslist” of blue links, created without a lot of consideration about presentation. It was largely about getting the job done, a natural approach for a heavily engineering driven team. Meanwhile, Reddit communities were free to customize their own visual language - including the Reddit logo itself - if they had fairly advanced CSS knowledge.
Since then, the product has become cleaner and more deliberate. We introduced a full set of custom iconography with the app launch in 2016. It’s still a practical design, but also more standardized and consistent, and the community customization options are accessible to a larger audience.
At the same time we defined the company’s brand visuals, centering it around the brand color OrangeRed, which from Reddit’s inception has been our smiling mascot’s eye color. We simplified and cleaned up the logo so we have something consistent and recognizable for both the app icon and external shared links. And to that we added neutrals and secondary colors that complement the brand color. We moved our mascot into the modern era with an updated character design that allows ‘Snoo’ to move freely. And recently we introduced our brand typeface, Reddit Sans, designed specifically to be accessible and highly legible, as well as supporting hundreds of languages. So the overall impression now is bold, fun, and inviting to a broader audience.
TM: Absolutely they have. Early on we had to consider how our brand would appear worldwide, which is part of why our identity emphasizes our icon over the wordmark. Iconography and symbols travel wonderfully into different cultures. At one point we did some research about how Reddit translated into other languages. One interesting finding was that Reddit in Chinese has been translated by our users as “the red network” which only served to highlight the wisdom of selecting OrangeRed as our brand color. We also consider international markets in our selection of imagery and topics to highlight in our marketing, to ensure local relevance wherever the creative may be seen.
TM: Snoo began as a sketch in our Co-founder’s notebooks while still in college, so they (Snoo has no gender) actually pre-date Reddit itself. Originally, Reddit was going to be named snew.com, as in “what’s new,” but that domain was not available. So when Reddit launched, the founders gave that name in slightly modified form to the company logo and mascot, Snoo.
In our fictionalized company history, Snoo is a time traveling alien curious about Earth and human culture. Snoo traveled back in time to give our founders the idea to start Reddit, which was already a success in their originating era.
Snoo’s curious personality lends itself naturally to representing the people who use Reddit and the myriad interests of our users. So today Snoo has become the foundation of our popular Reddit Avatar system, where users customize and generate their own unique versions of Snoo, using hundreds of individual features, clothing, and items. In our marketing creative, Snoo has recently entered the 3D realm, which is an exciting evolution.
LG: Starting in 2021, the Design Systems team began the process of auditing, curating and aligning 17 years of the Reddit experience into a consistent set of design patterns. The result is the Reddit Product Language (RPL). But creating the system is really just the start.
RPL takes many forms. Figma. Code. How-to guides. The consumers of RPL include not just the designers, but also product managers, engineers and more. Our goal is to make it easy for them to understand RPL and also to have the tools to make RPL come to life as Reddit.
TM: On the brand side, we have built up guidelines and refreshed them several times over the years, starting with pdfs created in Illustrator back in 2016. Today we’re very pleased with Lingo’s offering, which allows us to effectively share both brand guidelines and asset downloads simultaneously. It also makes sure that our growing audience of internal teams and external partners always see the latest guidelines, rather than sharing around quickly outdated pdfs.
TM: Without consistency, an audience will have a more difficult time understanding what a brand stands for and represents. Consistent presentation goes a long way to helping people connect with a brand. This is particularly evident to us at Reddit, where inconsistent brand representation for years meant that we had very low audience recognition compared to our peers. We’ve improved that dramatically over the past few years with our updated branding.
Internally, teams are able to create materials that are on-brand often without needing direct oversight because they can find all the resources they need through our online brand guidelines. Externally, we are able to spin up creative partners that much faster because of how accessible our guidelines and assets are.
TM: Obviously, our Snoo head logo is our most recognizable visual element and the related Snoo mascot and Avatars also have a place in our identity. As I touched on earlier, we’ve succeeded largely in establishing our OrangeRed brand color as a key element of our brand, and it’s present both in our logo and the upvote action in the product. The friendly, circular shape of our logo and mascot appears throughout the brand and product as a design element.
And we just introduced 3D illustration elements that showcase the myriad of interests that Redditors have (affectionately referred to as “puffy bois” by our employees). Those are beginning to appear in some of our events and collateral.
TM: Collaboration is essential to creativity, so we use a lot of different platforms to collaborate, and it really depends on the use case. As Lowell mentioned, Figma is a great collaborative tool especially when working on the product. We’re in constant contact using Slack and Zoom. We also use a lot of Google workplace tools of course, especially for writing and presentations. And recently we’ve started to integrate Canva into some of our workflows. Even Dropbox gets a lot of use because we need to share files and make sure they are synchronized - since we still do a lot with tools like Illustrator and Photoshop that still have their strengths for vector illustration and photo retouching.
LG: Is the future a place where minimalism is still dominant? The reigning aesthetic for many brands today is minimalism. Where does the joy of Snoo and the wonderful exuberance of our users’ creations fit in a world that’s often reduced to stark white backgrounds and thin gray lines?
Reddit is a human place. Humans are diverse, messy, energetic and wonderful. The visual language of Reddit should be big enough for all humanity to find their place.
TM: Exactly. We’re starting to introduce 3D elements now, I can envision more emphasis on movement in the future as well. We’re going to keep following our audience.
Thanks for sharing with us Lowell and Tavish!
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