Reddit Brand Guidelines: Orangered, Snoo & Reddit Sans

Reddit’s colour is so tied to the site that the community turned the hex into a noun.

Reddit’s signature is Orangered — #FF4500, an energetic orange-red the platform adopted as its own (it also happens to be the web colour literally named “OrangeRed”). It’s woven so deep into the experience that the little notification that tells you someone replied — the glowing envelope — is nicknamed an “orangered.” That’s the dream outcome for a brand colour: not just recognition, but a piece of shared language. When your users name things after your hex, you don’t just have a colour — you own one.

Reddit’s mascot began as a doodle in a college notebook — and grew into one of tech’s friendliest logos.

Snoo — the little alien in Reddit’s logo — was doodled by co-founder Alexis Ohanian around 2005; the name plays on “what’s new,” a nod to curiosity. In 2023, Reddit worked with Pentagram on a full refresh: a more three-dimensional, expressive Snoo, a cleaner wordmark, and a new bespoke type family. The genius of Snoo is deliberate blankness — the face carries no fixed expression, so the community can endlessly remix it into thousands of subreddit versions. It’s a participatory mascot, built to be drawn by its users, which is exactly the right idea for a site that is its community.

One loud, optimistic orange-red, kept simple. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Orangered #FF4500 leads, warm and attention-grabbing, used for the mark, buttons, and every “new” signal on the site. It’s supported by a clean near-black (#1A1A1B) for type and generous white space, so the orange always pops. It’s a friendly, unpretentious palette that matches the brand’s personality — a big, chaotic, human community — rather than trying to look slick or corporate. The restraint is smart: one strong colour, used everywhere, is what makes it ownable.

Reddit did the generous thing with its 2023 typeface — it open-sourced it for everyone.

The rebrand introduced a full custom family — Reddit Sans, Reddit Sans Condensed, Reddit Mono and a display cut — and released it open-source under the SIL Open Font License, free on Google Fonts. It’s warm, rounded and highly legible, at home in a dense comment thread or a big headline, and it gives Reddit one consistent, ownable voice across the site and its marketing. Like IBM Plex before it, giving the typeface away is both community-minded and shrewd — every designer who uses Reddit Sans spreads a little of the brand. (This article is set in it.)

Reddit’s identity is unusual because the company was never fully in charge of it.

For most of its life Reddit looked deliberately unpolished — a dense, utilitarian, almost anti-design interface that signalled substance over slickness and matched a site that called itself “the front page of the internet.” That plainness was itself a kind of positioning: in an era of glossy, over-art-directed apps, Reddit’s scrappiness read as authentic and community-first, a place run by its users rather than a marketing department. The mascot embodies the same bargain. Snoo’s blank, expressionless face is an open canvas by design, and thousands of subreddits have redrawn it in their own image — as a wizard, a chef, a team logo — making the brand something communities co-author rather than merely consume.

That heritage is exactly what made the 2023 Pentagram rebrand delicate. Professionalising the identity of a company preparing to go public risked sanding off the homemade charm that users prize, so the refresh had to modernise the wordmark and give Snoo a cleaner, more three-dimensional form while carefully preserving its remixability and the ownable Orangered. Open-sourcing Reddit Sans was part of the same balancing act — a gesture of the community-minded generosity the brand is built on, even as it grew more corporate. The result is a case study in a hard problem faced by every platform that grows out of a subculture: how to grow up as a brand, and reassure investors and advertisers, without betraying the grassroots, participatory, faintly chaotic character that made you worth using in the first place. Reddit’s answer was to modernise the craft while leaving the underlying idea untouched — a cleaner Snoo, a sturdier wordmark and a free typeface, but the same open invitation for its communities to keep making the brand their own.

Keep Reddit’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.