On a rainy day in San Francisco, a dozen or so designers sat crammed around a conference table inside Reddit's headquarters, in a space they had nicknamed The War Room. A few soggy rain jackets dripped onto the floor, and someone mumbled a maxim normally reserved for weddings about rain bringing good luck.

It was neither the first nor the last time this group would gather here to share the details of the project they'd been working on for over a year. But today was special. The designers had prepared an update for Reddit's website, which serves 330 million users from around the world. The irony of a dozen designers doing anything at Reddit was not lost on them—the text-heavy website is about as visually appealing as an overflowing email inbox. The designers engaged in some last-minute jockeying over the language of their update, and then they posted it using Reddit's signature droll tone: TIL Reddit has a design team.

For the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called 'front page of the internet.'

The team's efforts mark the first visual refresh of Reddit in over a decade. Steve Huffman, Reddit's cofounder and CEO, signaled the need for a tidying-up in a post last year. "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," Huffman wrote. "We'd like to fix that."

And so, for the past year and a half, Reddit and its new team of 20 designers have been refashioning the so-called "front page of the internet." They've taken great pains to build on top of Reddit's long legacy, rather than replacing it with something unfamiliar. They've argued about everything from the placement of the logo to the way moderators should style their communities to the dominant color on the site (red-orange, as it turns out). It's been a slow, careful process that everyone takes extremely seriously. "If you redesign Reddit," says Diego Perez, the company's head of design, "you're inherently changing the internet."

The new design's "classic" look is similar to Reddit's old appearance, but it has been updated with bigger fonts, a more modern appearance, and a navigation bar that—when opened—appears along the page's left side. Reddit

Today, about one percent of Redditors will see the new design. The refreshed layout will be introduced to more users gradually over the coming months and, at least for now, users can switch back to the old layout at any time. On the "new" Reddit, you'll find the navigation bar replaced by a hamburger menu in the left corner that surfaces feeds, subscriptions, and profiles. Next to it, a trio of buttons allow Redditors to view the site in three new ways: There's "card view," which looks a little like Facebook; "classic view," which borrows the design language from current Reddit; and "compact view," for users who want to scroll through tons of content quickly. Posts now open in a "lightbox," without taking users out of their page. New fonts make it easier to tell when you're clicking on a post or clicking on an outbound link. Beneath the description for r/all ("The most active posts from all of Reddit. Come here to see new posts rising and be a part of the conversation") there's a prominent, blue button to create a new post. And throughout the site, there are new illustrations of Snoo, Reddit's alien mascot, exploring the vast planets of the Reddit universe.

From far away, it still looks unmistakably like Reddit. But up close, the changes have turned Reddit from an esoteric maze into a website anyone can use—like a junk drawer that's been gutted, cleaned, and reorganized.

The story behind Reddit's redesign isn't just the odyssey to make Reddit look a little nicer. It's an internet Bildungsroman. When Huffman and cofounder Alexis Ohanian launched the site in 2005, Reddit represented the anarchist web, a place where you could do and say whatever you wanted so long as you could figure out how to get in. More than a decade later, Reddit has grown into something else. It's the place to talk about gaming, and Game of Thrones. It's a place not just for sharing information, but for sharing ideas. Reddit has said for years that the site is for everyone. Now, for the first time, it's starting to actually look like it.