At the start of 2017, our CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman announced our plans to redesign Reddit’s desktop site. “This is a massive project, and the transition is going to take some time,” he wrote. “We are going to need a lot of volunteers to help with testing.”

Well, ten months and several rounds of user and moderator testing later, we’re excited to share the very first look at the upcoming redesign. While we still have lots of improvements to the UI, feature set, and moderation flow still in the works, we’re excited to start by sharing a preview of two of the most important features in the redesign: a new set of community styling tools and an easier way for users to post to their favorite communities.

The End of “Dystopian Craigslist”

But first, here’s a quick recap of why we’re redesigning our desktop site to begin with.

As Steve put it in his AMA back in January, “The desktop website has not meaningfully changed in many years; it is not particularly welcoming to new users (or old for that matter); and still runs code from the earliest days of Reddit over ten years ago.”

Recently, he summed it up a bit more bluntly:

“Reddit grows primarily through word of mouth. Many of us evangelize Reddit and tell people how awesome it is, what an impact it’s made in their life, how much it makes them laugh, etc., and then when those new people decide to check out Reddit for the first time they’re greeted with dystopian Craigslist. We’d like to fix that.”

This year, teams across the company—from Design and Community to Product and Engineering—have been working together to do just that, rebuilding the desktop site to be more welcoming to new users and easier for moderators while iterating based on feedback from redditors at every stage.

Simpler Community Styling

One of the biggest areas of improvement we’ve focused on is offering simpler community styling. Reddit has tens of thousands of communities organized around every topic imaginable, and many of these mod teams have invested a significant amount of time into creating a unique aesthetic that feels like home.

For redditors unfamiliar with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), however, community customization can be difficult. With the redesign, we’ve created an all-new styling system that empowers mod teams to stylize their Reddit communities with design choices as unique as the communities themselves.

If you’ve ever created your own community, you know just how difficult it can be to alter the look of it through CSS, especially if you don’t have a background in coding, so we’re working on a number of features that make the customization process easier for moderators.

We still have a lot of work and testing to do before we have full feature parity and a design that we’re confident new and existing users will love; but in the meantime, here’s the preview you’ve all been waiting for, from Steve’s fireside chat at Web Summit 2017 earlier today:

Above is a sneak peek at what the r/aww and r/analog communities could look like in the redesign, with three different viewing options: card view (featuring already expanded image posts, for easy browsing in media-rich communities), classic view (similar to the layout of Reddit’s current listings pages), and compact view (for users who want to see the maximum number of posts per page, with the option of expanding images by clicking the media icon).

Easier Posting Flow

As we continue to improve our styling features, we’re also working to make other key parts of the Reddit experience more user-friendly—and versatile. One of the most central improvements we’ve made is revamping how users post to their favorite communities.

With Reddit’s current design, posting can be difficult for new users to figure out. With the redesign, we want to make sure that when redditors share a photo, image, or text post with a community, it’s easy for them to see that community’s rules, add all the necessary flair and tagging, and format text posts to their liking, all within the submission page.

Here’s another mock-up to show the posting flow for a redditor who wants to share an image with the r/aww community. For the sake of making this a truly “aww”-inducing mock-up, let’s say it’s an image of their adorable puppy named Banjo.

If you’re more of a lurker, you might not notice a few big upgrades to the existing submission page. Here’s what’s different:

simpler toggling between image or video, link, and text posts;

a drop-down menu to change the community where you’re posting;

a row of buttons at the bottom allowing you to add post flair, spoiler tags, and NSFW tags directly from the submission page;

prominently displayed community rules; and

an array of rich text options (no elaborate markdown required!).

We’ll be expanding our group of volunteer testers to more moderators and users soon and sharing more previews of our designs as we continue to iterate, so stay tuned for further updates. And in case you missed it, you can watch Steve’s full fireside chat at Web Summit here.

Our thanks to all of the users and moderators who have participated in testing so far for their invaluable feedback and to the r/aww and r/analog moderators for letting us test out the new structured styling on their communities.