PROJECT OVERVIEW
Reddit Iconography
Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit's registered community members can submit content such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can also vote submissions up or down, which determines their position on the page. We had the opportunity to work with the Reddit Design team on a complete redesign of 160+ icons. We worked in parallel with the huge redesign that the Reddit team was working on, this was a great opportunity to innovate in a space that hadn't seen change in over a decade.
We created a unique and consistent space-inspired iconography style, along with icon guidelines that allowed the Reddit Design team to add new icons to the set as needed. The space themed icons were influenced by Snoo, Reddit's long time alien mascot which fit well within their identity. The outcome was a fun, clever, and universal icon set that could be easily understood on a global scale.
SPECIFICATIONS
Iconography Guidelines
The icon set is based on a 16px grid, the product icons were typically used at very small sizes that's why we created the base at such a small size. The set uses a variation of stroke widths, the outer areas use rounded corners at 2px stroke weight with interior details and spacing set at 1px. Again, with the primary usage of these icons being so small the amount of detail within them was extremely limited.
We worked closely with some of the designers on their team to help define when, how, and where to include the smaller 1px stroke details. The interesting challenge here was that the redesign was currently in-flight and we built these icons on a 16px grid, knowing that the default size may fluctuate as you may see on Reddit.com where some of the icons are used at an even smaller size than 16px. The key was finding the happy medium between the grid size, stroke weight, and the amount of details within each of the icons. Overall, the set has some quirks and leans more on the space theme when possible, but the rest of the set is meant to be bold, fun, and friendly.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Credits & Press
We're super thankful to have had the opportunity to partner with the Reddit Design Team on this project. The team put in some serious time over the past year to make all of this come together. Also, a special thanks to Diego Perez for bringing us onboard for this project – it's an honor to have some of our work featured (Wired, Fast Company, The Verge) within this massive redesign.
