#Specially the ones who took free speech way too seriously and talk without any reserve
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romanticatheartt · 8 months ago
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Well f*cking done people. Keep this up and you'll chase away every single artist. Good job.
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sunshinejihyun · 4 years ago
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Okay okay how about 49 with Victor just for the fun of it? Love you lots 💙💙 -Anne
@jihyuncompass asked: Okay okay how about 49 (”You’re a fun drunk”) with Victor just for the fun of it? Love you lots 💙💙
Author’s note: Anne, this request has truly inspired me. Seriously, it’s about 800 words over the length I had expected it to be, but I enjoyed every second I spent writing it.
Special shout out to @spacesquidlings who lent me her wine expertise and @mrloveidiotschoice who took the time to check out a complete strangers writing because I wasn’t sure I was writing Victor in character. Seriously, thank you both so much. 
Warnings: Mentions of drinking, teensy bit of spoilers for Chapter 10 of the game but they’re so minor (heh) you probably wouldn’t even know, a bit of nakedness but nothing sexual, mentions of nightmares
Word count: 1968
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If This is a Dream (Then Don’t Wake Me Up)
Victor bolted upright, his heartbeat hammering in his ears and sweat drenched bangs were clinging to his forehead. His hands were gripping the silky sheets so tightly that his knuckles turned white and his fingers were starting to ache.
She was gone. She walked away from him, ignoring his screams. His arms reaching to grab her passed right through her, as if she was a ghost.
As if she was never real.
But as a bare leg brushed his own, Victor felt his hands unclench and he looked over at the woman laying beside him. Her bangs were ruffled and hair was haphazardly strewn across the extra pillow he had on his bed for when she stayed over.
She was still there.
Brushing the hair out of her face, Victor felt a small smile tug on his lips as he saw her brows furrow slightly as she murmured something in her sleep before moving closer to him, letting out a content sigh and then her soft snores filled the room once more.
Reaching over to his nightstand, Victor grabbed a tissue and wiped at the sweat on his brow before making a mental note to have his bedding cleaned before he settled down for the next night. Then, Victor settled back into the pillow and faced her, taking one more look at her serene face before closing his eyes and resting his hand gently on her hip, underneath her night shirt, and rubbing circles into the soft skin until he fell back to sleep.
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Victor awoke before her, he usually did. In their new normal, he would spend some time busying himself with making coffee and a small breakfast - he knew she liked to eat and probably wouldn’t make it throughout the day without something in her stomach - and the smell would finally rouse her out of bed and she’d shuffle into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes before quietly accepting the coffee that was made just the way she liked. They both sat on the couch and sipped on their coffees, their forks clinking against the fine china Victor had plated their breakfasts on while the both of them took in the quiet moment they could spend together before another hectic day at work.
But this morning, Victor spent his time in the shower, just letting the warm water trickle down his back while he thought. That dream from the night before wasn’t the first he’s had. No, it was one of the many that had come to him within the last few weeks. It was why he asked her to spend the night with him; it was easier to reassure himself that she wasn’t gone when she was sleeping next to him.
Of course, she knew nothing of his recent dreams or worries; she just thought that him asking her to stay the night was a new development in their relationship - which it was, but selfishly, Victor’s anxiety over those dreams put the excitement of their progression on the backburner. He didn’t know why now all of a sudden these dreams were haunting him. They’ve been together for only a small bit of the time they knew each other but he figured if there was any time to have anxieties over her leaving him, it would be later down the line, once they had been together for a longer amount of time.
He never even thought that it would be because he was worried to lose her again, after he found her all those years later.
Victor jumped as he felt arms wrap around his waist and a warm body press against his front. When he cleared the water out of his eyes, he patted down her hair, biting his lip to keep a smile off his face as she made a soft sound of contentment. “Good morning,” her voice was huskier than normal, signaling that she had just woken up. “How’d you sleep?”
Ignoring her question, Victor prodded her side and watched as she squirmed in his arms. “You had to have slept well, you were snoring so loud.” He teased her as he moved them so her body was absorbing most of the hot water and gently ran his fingers through her hair as it started to wet.
“You can’t blame me! Your bed is cosy.” As Victor lathered her hair in shampoo and took in her rosy cheeks, she leaned against his body, and he relished in the way she felt against him; like she fit perfectly. She was soft in all the places Victor was hard and the feeling of her bare skin against his own was something he longed for when she wasn’t around.
The rest of the morning was fairly quiet, like usual, and before he dropped her off at the front of Miracle Finder’s building, Victor gently grabbed her chin before kissing her softly and after he noticed the blush dusting her cheeks as she got out of his passenger’s seat, he gave her one of his rare smiles - something that was pretty much reserved only for her - and quipped a “don’t burn the company down” before speeding off to work, already ready to finish the day and be in her intoxicating presence once again.
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Dinner was uneventful, except for the fact that Victor had poured himself a few too many glasses of imported red wine from Rhône Valley to drink with the steak he had cooked to perfection and paired with some steamed and seasoned vegetables.
“This is better than the food at Souvenir!” She exclaimed around a mouthful of food. “How is it every time I eat your food it’s better than the last time?”
Victor shook his head slightly and responded, his speech slightly slurred. “You just say that because you like to eat. Should I come up with a payment plan for this meal too?”
Her cheeks reddened and Victor wanted to reach out and touch them, to feel the warmth of her skin against his, just to ensure that she was real and this wasn’t another dream that she’d disappear from eventually. “Hey! I didn’t come asking for food tonight, you offered! I was just going to order takeout!”
Picking up his wine glass, Victor swirled it around twice and smelled the peppery aroma that was subtly mixed with some dark fruits before taking another sip and raising his eyebrows at her over the glass. “Like I’d let you stuff yourself with garbage when I’m perfectly capable of cooking, dummy.”
“You’re a fun drunk,” she muttered under her breath and Victor had to fight back a laugh at her face. Her lips were pouted slightly and her hair fell over her face, hiding her behind a curtain of chestnut.
“I’m not acting any different than I normally would.” Victor replied, going to swirl the wine once again, just because he could. As it sloshed over the edge of his wine glass and onto his chest, he looked up at her, a sheepish look crossing over his dark features. “Or not.”
“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.” Victor watched as she rose from her seat and extended a hand towards him. Once his hand was firmly pressed in hers, he followed her to the bathroom where she started unbuttoning his shirt slowly.
“You know, if you wanted to get me undressed all you had to do was ask. You didn’t need to invite me here under false pretenses.” Victor knew he sounded stupid but he couldn’t stop himself from teasing her just a little; the pink flush on her cheeks and neck were too adorable to ever stop.
“Victor,” he could tell she didn’t know what to say by the way she ducked her head and bit her lip.
“Please stay tonight.” Victor didn’t beg, that wasn’t him; but he’d be damned if he had to wake up another night alone, panicking about her not being there when he checked his phone in the morning. He was never satisfied until he called her and her voice filtered through his ear.
“I shouldn’t. I’ve got lots of work to get done.” When she looked into his eyes, he knew she could see a vulnerability in them that she’d never seen before. He knew that she saw his pleading, his need for her to be there with him. “Hey, what’s the matter? Don’t tell me you’re an emotional drunk?”
Her teasing tone caused Victor to tighten the grip on her waist. “I just… I’m nervous when I wake up and you’re not around.” As she pushed his wine soaked dress shirt the rest of the way off his shoulders, Victor’s skin prickled in goosebumps at her feathery light touch. “I like knowing where you are.” He wouldn’t normally be this vulnerable, but in his efforts to forget the dreams, the extra glasses of wine only dissolved his filter.
She bit her lip and pushed some of the hair that was falling into Victor’s eyes to the side. “Is this what your nightmare was about last night?”
“You knew?” Victor pulled her to him, her body standing in between his strong legs. He still had height over her, despite the fact he was sitting on the bathroom counter. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she shook her head and wrapped her arms around his bare middle. “I just heard you talking in your sleep and your turning woke me up. I was going to say something but I figured you’d have woken me up if you needed me.”
“I always need you,” Victor replied honestly, pressing a featherlight kiss to her head. “You’re the only one competent enough to run Miracle Finder.”
“Jerk.” She slapped his chest lightly and Victor laughed, grabbing her hand and placing it over his heart, so she could feel it beating. “I thought you were trying to be romantic for once.” “Dummy,” he cupped her cheek with his one free hand and guided her lips to his, close enough where they were brushing against each other but not yet kissing. “You know I’d be lost without you.”
As Victor connected her lips to his, he felt his heart soar and in his mind, he spoke to himself:
“This is the most alive I’ve ever felt. If this is a dream, as long as I’m with her, I don’t want to wake up from it.”
Once she had pulled away, gasping for air, she smiled at Victor. “I guess I can stay over once more. On one condition.” “What is it?” He picked her up and started walking her towards the bedroom and noted the new red silk sheets on the bed. “I can’t promise I’ll oblige without incentive.”
“I demand that in order for me to stay that you wake me up if you find yourself with another nightmare.” As he laid her down and hovered over her, she smiled cheekily at him. “And you need to make breakfast tomorrow morning, I was starving today!”
Victor rolled his eyes before moving off of the girl, his head resting on the same pillow as hers. “I guess those are fair conditions, though I do recall you only mentioning you had one.”
“I did, until I remembered how hungry I was today.” She rolled over to face him and traced his lips with her pointer finger. “I enjoy spending time with you.” “You’re more tolerable than most,” Victor agreed before kissing her softly once more.
“You’re such a fun drunk.” She teased again once he released her lips. “You’ve told me more tonight than you ever have before. I’m getting you drunk more often.”
“Don’t count on it,” Victor warned, but there was a teasing tone in his voice and his lips were almost curved into a smile.
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ii. Fun Facts About The Cast | Actor Au | Obey Me
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Request: Its not, I love this AU tho
Word Count: 2303 words
Page Count: 6.5 pages
A.N. Hope you guys all like this! Fun facts about the cast lmao
[ Actor AU Masterlist ]
Fun Facts
Benjamin ( Lucifer )
- Is the dad of the cast.
- In any scenes with Dmitri ( Luke ), he makes sure to know if he is alright, and often will stop scenes to ask.
- He also is an overall joker, so he has trouble filming most of his scenes, will often start laughing in the middle of filming and can break character the easiest.
- Best with kids overall, probably due to having his own, keeps their lives private tho.
- His hair was white for a past show, but the directors liked the look, so that's why he has white tips.
- One of the few male characters who cannot do those diets to accentuate his abs- so that's why his character is always covered up.
- He's in shape! But, he likes the fat that protects his muscle, he says he needs to stay soft to hug his kids.
- Known diabetic, so there's a table full of foods so his sugars are stable, the cast has glucagon shots all over the sets to be safe.
- Is in his early thirties, but people say he can pull off early twenties- he just snorts at this.
Avery ( Mammon ) 
- Takes the job seriously, and his scenes are easiest to film.
- Dark humor and often is the "Lucifer" of the cast.
- Seeing him switch from Avery to Mammon leaves the rest of the cast and crew fucking s h o o k.
- Will always be seen looking his finest.
- No, no one has seen him in public in sweatpants or anything like that. His image is very serious.
- Is a sweetheart when with the rest of the cast tho.
- His eyes are actually that blue.
- No one is sure if his hair is actually white or not, the way he speaks about it is vague, and fans are always theorizing.
- Watching over Benji ( Lucifer ), and is usually the one to tell him to check his sugars, since the other is quite forgetful.
- Is an immigrant from Turkey, so he has an accent, makes people thirst for him more.
- Helps aspiring actors and directors get into the field, and goes on hard work and talent, not who tries to pay him off.
Jackson ( Leviathan )
- Is the resident fuckboi.
- Always with males and females hanging off him, at this point the pop gave up, no- they aren't his partner.
- Flexes a shit ton.
- Wearing chains, a Rolex, and anything designer.
- Donates half of his salary to ocean reserves and protection funds, he has the money for it, and the show pays him well.
- Always at the beach, or near lake houses and shit, the one ( 1 ) thing he likes about his character.
- Hates the fringe he wears with a passion.
- His hair is actually a light shade of brown, his eyes are a darker shade, but still pretty light.
- First generation, his parents are Korean, so you can pick up hints of their accent in his speech patterns. Gets heavy when he's sleepy. 
Ross ( Satan )
- Is a stoner.
- Goes on Instagram lives with either MC and gets high, talking about the dumbest shit or he's alone in his room and his cats join in.
- "So, if you think about- oH MY GOD PRINCESS. YES, COME TO DADDY."
- Has a kitten curled up on him, purrs loud as hell because mf is so warm, and the lives turn into purring ASMR sessions.
- Into self care, has a line of vitamins, face masks, and everything you can think of.
- Calls his fans his SaStans.
- Dmitri ( Luke ) is his younger brother.
- Will never let him out of his sight, and they love to be as mean as they can to each other, they love each other but love to bully one another.
- Is from the Bronx, so his accent is what Avery ( Mammon ) mimics for his character, often just records Avery's lines and sends them to him so he can practice.
- Owns an animal shelter he funds.
- "Carol Baskin? Who's that?"
- The REAL tiger king.
- Gets all his cats dyed to look like tigers.
Micheal ( Asmodeus )
- Chill as fuck.
- Has like 5+ kids, so the role fits him perfectly, and now it's an on running joke among fans that they are all his illegitimate children.
- You know why Asmodeus on the show wears so much makeup? 
- His eldest daughter is one of the makeup artists, and she loves to try new looks on him, and the producers think it would fit the character well.
- People speculate his age, looks young but is in his late 30's.
- His first child was born when he was 16, so he likes to support safe heavens and things like that for struggling youths- from being kicked out to needing assistance with mental health.
- Tired af.
- Always in sweatpants, him and Ross ( Satan ) are the trademark bums of the cast.
- Thinks it would be hilarious that when Micheal is revealed, in the show, that he plays the character.
- Is a writer as well, TSL is a real series and he writes it, so they let him use it in the show.
- Vlogs in his car, in a Wendy's parking lot, eating a shit ton of food and talking about the most random shit.
- Half asleep in all interviews, wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, it's gotten to the point where everyone memes it too.
James ( Beelzebub )
- Himbo.
- One of the few cast members closest to their character.
- Absolute sweetheart.
- He's 20 years old.
- But how is he so fucking big???
- Comes from a big ass family, the middle child, he's baby 4 out of 9.
- All his siblings are redheads too.
- Very playful tho, with the cast always going along with his antics, making for the best bloopers.
- The contacts he wears make him blind af, which doesn't help since he's so tall, and will bump his head on the doorways and such.
- Can speak Scottish-Gaelic, and even has an accent to top it off.
- He is an absolute unit, and one of the characters who does the stupid diet to show off his form.
- Literally on the verge of passing out sometimes, so he needs to rest with Benjamin ( Lucifer ).
- All pictures, shirtless scenes, and such are filmed first so he can rest after and go back to a normal diet.
- Quiet guy, but loves talking about sports and his siblings tho.
- Is always carrying MC and Dmitri ( Luke ) around, now there are many off-guard photos posted to the casts shared twitter+instagram accounts
- Still pretty new to acting, but is amazing at emotional scenes, to the point fans actually think he's having a breakdown.
- Nah, he's just thinking about being alone, without his family- and it gets him bawling for said scenes.
Conner ( Belphegor )
- Crackhead 
- Will not stay still, either for filming or just when everyone is chilling.
- Scenes where he's asleep? He's usually turned away from the camera, cause the idiot is smiling and giggling.
- Has tripped over his tail multiple times.
- Comes from a farm-life, literal cowboy, his southern accent just hits hard.
- He hides it very well, but it comes out at times or with certain words.
- Sees Benjamin ( Lucifer ) as a mentor, he's in his early twenties and new to the scene, but they are best friends.
- Benjamin ( Lucifer ) has now acquired a new child.
- A living meme.
- You know how Tom Holland can't keep a secret?
- Yeah, he's worse.
- Rest of the cast have all had to physically stop him from talking at one point.
- The cow pillow? It's actually his, when he got the role his father has sewn it himself, so he will bring it with him.
- It's basically free promo for the show and comforts him in the city space.
- Gets overwhelmed in large crowds, so he usually makes sure to have another cast member close by, or he will literally leave to a less crowded place to take a breath.
- Apologized to MC after the scene in which he kills them.
- His mama raised him right, so he takes MC to his house for a movie, in which they cuddle and relax for the night.
- Felt really bad for like... a whole week.
- "Country boy I love you~"
Thomas ( Barbatos )
- Brat.
- This is one cocky man, he's smooth as hell, and one whisper can make you weak in the knees.
- Grew out the one side of his hair, but he slicks his hair back or will pin it back, dyes it himself when it's time to film.
- Loves to piss Alex ( Simeon ) off.
- Has a true crime podcast with Roman ( Diavolo ), Alex ( Simeon ), and Benjamin ( Lucifer ), because they're all old friends.
- Donates to the cold case foundation because he knows what it's like to lose someone and not know what happened to them.
- He has a twin who is his stunt double, they love to fuck with the rest of the cast, both of them are little shits.
- Is the motherfucker who makes a channel and reads the crackhead fanfics
- Loves every word of it tho.
- Responds to every fans dms. Every. One. As a whole account for this shit.
- Walks with a bit of a limp, so he wears a brace to help even himself, but during wide-shot scenes you can catch it sometimes.
- Took actual classes to be a butler for the role.
Roman ( Diavolo )
- Himbo 2.0
- Catch this man tweeting what he's trying to search up at 2 in the morning.
- Leaves them because it's hilarious, makes videos where he reads them out sometimes, it's all in good fun.
- He has a set of triplets at home, so that dad energy radiates into the show too.
- You know how Diavolo seems sus at points of the game? Yeah, he's still like that IRL.
- The rest of the cast was put off at first, but that's how he is, and everyone eased up pretty quickly.
- Makes jokes that he has family in the Italian mob, but needed to stop once his father called him, saying that there were too many eyes on the family now.
- Man was s h o o k.
- Has sensitive skin, so all his makeup and body paints need to be specially made, made with all natural products.
- The bags under his eyes are baby bags.
- Will bring his kids on set, to which everyone will gush over, and watch them when they aren't filming.
- Very private with his kids ( to the public ), doesn't post about them much, and only the cast really sees them.
- Wine dad.
- Catch him bringing the whole cast out for "family trips"
- People nicknamed him Caesar
- So many JoJo references now
- "SHHHHIIIIIZZZAAAAAAAA"
- "Please, no."
Dmitri ( Luke )
- Is actually 12.
- Quotes vines, tiktoks, and other memes.
- Is one of the few people that Alex ( Simeon ) is openly nice too.
- Also has an accent, but since he's young and is learning, can now mimic every other cast member's accent.
- Wear earplugs for certain scenes, because of how raunchy and dark the scenes can get, so Simeon and Barbatos are always conveniently in the way, hiding the plugs.
- Is Ross' ( Satan ) younger brother, and if he isn't hanging off of him he's with James ( Beelzebub ), Benjamin ( Lucifer ), or MC.
- They know there are some sick fucks in Hollywood so he has an adult with him at all times.
- Posts pictures of him cuddling up to his brother and the kittens, new foods he is trying, and some pictures with family.
- He often is considered the new Gordon Ramsay.
- Had a collaboration with him.
- It was amazing.
- Best boy, catch him taking a nap in his ( and Ross' ) trailer, surrounded by tiger kittens.
- The TIGER PRINCE.
Alex ( Simeon )
- Avatar of wrath who?
- The embodiment of "No talk me, I angy"
- Jkjk, though he does have a temper, he only loses it with Benjamin ( Lucifer ), Roman ( Diavolo ), and Thomas ( Barbatos ).
- A sweetheart with all children though, like you know Simeon on the show? 
- Yeah, he's only like that with kids.
- And respectable adults.
- Mama raised him well 2.0
- Grew up in NY
- Born in Gucci and Balenciaga.
- Was a child model and slowly expanded to acting.
- Dark humor galore.
- If Simeon met Alex, he'd probably have a stroke, cause THOSE WORDS are coming out of HIS mouth.
- Says the weirdest shit too.
- "Put your hand on my ass and call me a virgin."
- Bro are you okay???
- He is fluent in five languages and has a high IQ.
- Speaks: English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Mandarin
- Has a support system for children who struggle to learn conventionally, with trained tutors who are affordable, he knows what it's like to need certain needs met to learn, and he wants every kid to get that chance.
- Rough around the edges but has a heart of gold.
Derek ( Solomon )
- Loves to smoke with Ross ( Satan )
- He is more aloof than chill.
- One of the more awkward members, doesn't know how to socialize well, and is very shy.
- Watch out for Dmitri ( Luke ) on the down low.
- Didn't have the best life growing up, so he is a lot more street smart than book smart.
- Doesn't have a big social media influence.
- Very nice to fans, gives full hugs to them, and everyone feels so appreciated.
- Has a husky named Blue.
- Also has an owl, who he took in when he found it on his porch with a broken wing, and nursed it to health.
- He set it free, but she comes back often, and has a nest in the tree closest to his house.
- Named her Lovely.
- Animal person, so he helps Ross out with his animal shelters.
- Uses Blue as a living pillow, and only sleeps in his boxers when Blue is on his bed, because goddamn does that dog radiate heat.
- Him and MC live together, having grown up together, and made their livings together. 
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myhockeyworld87 · 5 years ago
Text
Nervous Regrets - Tyler Seguin - Part 28
Word Count: 4,565
POV: Reader
Warnings: Language, smut, nsfw
Notes: Sorry this took so long getting out, been in kind of rut lately. Will keep plugging on though. Happy Reading!
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Tyler had reserved a room in the back at one of your favorite restaurants, closer to your house than downtown. By the time the two of you got there, Jamie and Jenna were already there. The table was lavishly decorated with fresh flowers and more glassware than you’d use for three meals let alone one. Soft candlelight gave the room an intimate glow. Jamie and Jenna’s voice broke through your thoughts. “Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Seguin.” You didn’t think that you would ever get tired of hearing people call you and Tyler that.
“Thank you guys so much for everything today.” You went over and hugged your best friend. “I’m so glad you were there today, to stand beside me.”
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Can’t wait to do it again.” She teased.
Jamie came over then, and enveloped you in a huge hug, lifting you off your feet. His voice was hushed for only you to hear. “You know, I’ve never seen him happier than he is right now, and it’s all because of you.” He set you back on your feet again. “And let me be the first to officially welcome you to the family.” You quirked a brow at him, and he just shrugged his shoulder. “Well, you know Tyler’s like a brother to me, so I guess you’re officially my sister now.”
Going up on your toes, you pecked Jamie on the cheek. “Thanks, Jame. I couldn’t ask for a better brother than you.”
“Chubbs, are you hitting on my wife.”
Jamie held up his hands in surrender. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
Sauntering over to your husband, you slid your arms around him. “He could try, but I only have eyes for my husband.”
“Well, that goes both ways, Mrs. Seguin, since I can’t stop staring at you.” His lips came down on yours, kissing you softly.
“Alright, if you two continue this, we’ll never get to eat.” Jamie chirped.
You all ordered, and then the waitress brought out some non-alcoholic sparkling wine for you all to celebrate. Once you all had a glass, Jamie raised his for a toast. “I honestly thought this day would never happen, but here we are, all be it sooner than we expected.” A small chuckle escaped your lips. “I’ll keep this one short, and save my actual speech when we do this again this summer. (Y/N), when Tyler told me he was going to buy a house in hopes to win you back; I thought he was damn near crazy, and man you have to admit you were. But somehow, you saw through all his craziness and decided to love him anyway. You two have overcome some insurmountable odds to get to today, but (Y/N) I want you to know that from that first day Tyler met you, he knew you’d be his wife. He wouldn’t stop talking about you, whether we were in the locker room or out on the ice or just sitting at home drinking a few beers.” You looked over smiling at Tyler, who just whispered that it was true. “You were it for him from the very beginning, and he couldn’t have made a better choice.”
He paused for a moment and cleared his throat, a little choked up by what he had to say next. “Tyler, man, you’re like a brother to me. In fact, I probably spend more time with you than I do my own brother. There was definitely a time when I thought you’d never settle down, but then along came (Y/N); and man, she made you not only a better person but a better hockey player and an even better friend. I know that you’ll be the greatest husband that she could ever ask for because if you don’t, you’re going to have to answer to both me and Jenna.” You all laughed then; Jenna agreeing with Jamie the entire time. “But seriously man, I’m lucky to have you as a friend and stand beside you during all these moments in our lives.”
“I know I said this wasn’t going to be long, but I’m going to give one last piece of advice. I once heard someone say, ‘you don’t marry a person you can live with, you marry someone you can’t live without.’ (Y/N), I know for a fact Tyler, can’t live without. I’ve seen him try, and he was miserable; from what Jenna has told me, so were you. So if times ever get tough, remember that you are stronger together than you are apart. I know that your love will get you through anything, for it already has.”  He raised his glass then and you all followed. “So here’s to the two of you. May you have a lifetime of love and happiness. Cheers!” Everyone clinked glasses together, and you locked eyes with Tyler as you both took a sip.
The rest of the meal you guys chatted about just about everything and anything, from the upcoming road trip they had in two days, to where the two of you were going to have your summer wedding. Jamie and Jenna had got you both a small wedding cake, so you and Tyler could feed each other cake. You thought at first he was going to go easy on you, but then right at the end, he smeared some frosting all over your lips. He told you, he did it on purpose so that he could kiss it off. Two hours later and you were again thanking Jamie and Jenna for everything they did that day. You were finally on your way home, where it would be just you and your husband, and you couldn’t wait. When you pulled into the driveway, Tyler insisted you stay in the car. He walked around and opened your door, then picked you up in his strong arms. “Don’t even argue with me. I’m officially carrying my wife over the threshold like I’ve wanted to do from the moment I met you.” He wouldn’t get any arguing from you this time, and even though it would’ve been easier to just walk through the garage door, he carried you all the way to the front, just because he wanted to.
The dogs were there to greet you guys right away. “Hi guys,” Tyler said with you still in his arms. “Your mom and dad got married today, isn’t that exciting.” They barked happily and wagged their tails at you both, just begging for attention. He put you down then, as he could tell you were dying to pet them. You both bent down giving your boys lots of love. “I’m going to let them out, and then I’ll meet you in the bedroom, Mrs. Seguin.”
“I’ll see you in there, Mr. Seguin.”
He moved further into the house to let them out but stopped midway. “Don’t take that dress off, that’s my job.” Your head fell back as you laughed at his comment. It didn’t take Tyler long at all, as you were just walking out of the closet from putting your heels away and he was barring your fur babies from coming into the bedroom. He was standing by the bed, sans suit jacket and tie, as he said. “Get over here Mrs. Seguin.”
You went into his arms easily. “I get the feeling you like my new last name.” You teased him playfully.
“I fucking love it. I can’t wait until you change it officially.”
“Soon, babe.”
“I know, but I can still call you it whenever I want.” He said pressing your lips to his. “Like now.” He kissed your exposed neck, and you moaned. “I love how this spot drives you crazy Mrs. Seguin.” His lips traveled down, to skim lightly over the top of your breasts, as his hand unzipped your dress in the back. He tugged at the front of your dress, letting your tits spill-free. Taking an erect nipple in his mouth, he gently nibbled on it, before whispering out. “And these Mrs. Seguin…I love sucking on them.” His tongue flicked over it and your breast arched into his mouth. “So needy aren’t you Mrs. Seguin.” The number of times he had called you by your married name would be almost comical if he wasn’t doing such wicked things with his mouth.
Slowly, he peeled the dress down off your body, taking your panties with it in the process. “My god, you’re beautiful. How did I get so lucky?” His hands were all over you, kneading your breasts, slipping between your folds. Your body tingled with need and you brought your shaking hands up to unbutton his shirt. He gently laid you back on the mattress, following you down. Spreading your legs, he trailed kisses over the baby and then to the inside of your thigh. You sighed when he blew a soft breath on your clit, before taking his tongue and licking you just once.
Your hands went and threaded into his hair, a silent plea for more. He willingly obliged, taking your clit and sucking on it. Back arching into his mouth, you couldn’t prevent the moans that came from you. “Oh god, Tyler.” Two of his fingers slipped inside you, and he started pumping them in and out of you. Your body was so sensitive to his every touch, that it didn’t take long before the first signs of your orgasm started to bubble to the surface.  But he wasn’t willing to give it to you just yet, as he picked his head up, dragging his body off of yours so he could remove the rest of his clothing.
He stood before you naked, cock in hand, as you licked your lips in anticipation of what was to come. “I love you so much (Y/N).”
“I love you too Ty.” You reached your hands out to him and he came willingly into them. His lips found yours, the kiss sweet and tender. It reminded you of the first time you’d kissed him. There was no hurried need to it, as the two of you had a lifetime to spend like this. His tongue tangled with yours, as his body pressed you further into the mattress. It was only then that his cock started to enter you. He slowly pushed inside you; the two of you always fit perfectly together, but this time, this was different. It was if your souls were combing into one. You couldn’t count the number of times you’d made love to Tyler before, but tonight, this was different, more special; it was like tasting a little bit of heaven. The kiss continued on, as he thrust in and out of you. Your hips rose up to meet him each time, and soon the two of you built a rhythm up.
When you felt as if you were going to pass out from lack of air, you pulled away from the kiss, both of you panting. Though your mouths weren’t molded together at the moment, you still locked eyes with Tyler. “God…(Y/N)…I love you.” His speed picked up then.
“I love you too…husband.” The primal groan that left his lips went straight to your core and you felt the strands of your orgasm begin. The angle that he thrust into you changed and he hit that favorite spot inside you. In just three thrusts you were there, screaming out your pleasure as he continued to pump in your pussy.
You were spasming around him as he drew the orgasm out of you and soon he was thrusting erratically into you. His hot cum spurted into you, as he called out your name. Eye burrowing into each other as you both came in ecstasy. He collapsed to the side of you, and rolled you over to him, hugging you close to his body. “That was…” He said breathily. “I can’t even describe it, babe.”
“I know.” You echoed back to him, for there was making love and then there was what you’d just done, which seemed to be next level. You were lying next to him, idly tracing his tattoos. It hit you then, as you watched your left hand running along his body. You’d never asked him about the rings. “Ty,” his eyes were closed and you thought he might be drifting off to sleep, but as soon as you spoke his name they popped open. “When did you get us, wedding bands?”
“Oh, well the day you went shopping for the dress; I did a little shopping of my own. They don’t have to be permanent. We can get new ones for the summer wedding.” He took your hand then and brought it to his lips to kiss. “Although, I plan on getting mine tattooed on.”
“You want to tattoo your ring on?”
“Yeah babe, I can’t wear the actual ring when I play, but I definitely want everyone to know that I’m married to the most wonderful woman in the world.” He rubbed his thumb over the frown on your forehead. “Don’t worry babe, I’ll still have a regular one that I’ll wear as well.”
He’d misinterpreted why you weren’t keen on him getting his ring tattooed. “It’s not that.” You weren’t exactly sure how to say it.
“Then what is it, babe?”
“Well, I feel like it’s the kiss of death when a couple does that. You know, just the same way that you should never get my name tattooed on you.” It was an irrational fear, but you had it anyway.
You could feel the vibration of his soft chuckle, as he hugged you a bit closer to him. “Babe, that’s just a myth you know. There’s no way that I am going to fall out of love with you because I get some tattoo.”
“Says the man, who has to be the last off the ice from warmups because he’s superstitious.”
He pulled back to look you in the eye, his brows creasing together to give you an incredulous look. “That’s completely different.” It was your turn to return that look now. “What, it is! Hockey’s just a game babe, and you’re supposed to have rituals so that you do well. This is life, and there is nothing, that could ever make me fall out of love with you. Especially not a little tattoo. Besides, if you hadn’t noticed, all these…” He motioned to his chest and arms. “Are all about family, and that’s you (Y/N). In case you forgot we were just married a few hours ago.”
Playfully, you swatted at him. “As if you’d let me.”
“Ow, stop.” He teased you back, grabbing your wrist and kissing the inside of it, then quickly pecking your lips. “But seriously, I plan on getting that tattoo, as well as some others, to commemorate today. So get over your superstitions woman.” Rolling your eyes, you had no choice but to place your trust in your love. He was right the two of you would make your own luck and it wouldn’t be bad, that was for sure. His voice captured your attention again. “I also plan on getting something done for the baby.” His hand went to caress your stomach then. “I want to do something on my back with all our kids.”
“All our kids huh? And just how many do you think that will be?”
“Hmmm. I don’t know, four or five at least.” Your eyes widen at the large number he mentioned. “Well, we need a whole hockey team, babe.” You both started to giggle.
“I suppose we can discuss the number after we get this first one out.”
“Agreed, though we can still practice until he or she comes.” The rest of the night, the two of you made love so many times you lost count, but it was definitely more times than the number of kids he wanted. The following day Tyler had morning practice and then it was back to American Airlines Center for his last home game before he would be gone on another road trip. True to his word, Tyler scored two goals after marriage, one of which was a game-winning overtime goal. Of course, he chirped Jamie the entire walk out to the cars, telling him that he was definitely a better player, now that he was a married man.
Time flew by, as you settled into married life; which turned out to not be so much different than before. Except that Tyler took every chance in private to call you wife or Mrs. Seguin; which you did the same in return. Soon, you found yourself packing for Cabo. You’d only be gone for six days, but you found yourself packing two suitcases just for your stuff alone. “Jesus wife, how much stuff do you need to hang out at the beach?” Tyler whined as he took the suitcases out to the car.
“Well, I packed extra for the photoshoot and stuff. Stop complaining, it’s a private jet; it’s not like you’re paying for baggage.”
“These weigh a ton.” He stated, heaving one into the g-wagon.
“If you can’t lift them, I’ll do. I have more muscles than you.”
“I’m just teasing you, besides you shouldn’t be lifting anything in your condition.” Tyler was letting you do less and less around the house. The housekeeper now came more than just one day a week, she was there usually three if not four. Your house was not that dirty that she needed to be there that often, but when you’d brought the subject up with Tyler he wouldn’t even entertain the idea of having her go back to just one day. “Alright, everything is in the car, are you ready to go babe?”
“Just a second.” You were in the living room kneeling down getting the last little bit of dog kisses before you left them for vacation. “I know, I’m gonna miss you too. Promise to be good while dad and I gone.” Gerry was pouting over in the corner; he had started the minute you packed your suitcases. He got that way on from time to time when Tyler left for a road trip, but you were always home, so it didn’t last long. This time he’d been sulking all morning. “Come on Ger, come tell me goodbye.” You slapped your thigh in hopes of getting his attention.
“It’s no use. He’ll be fine. He always is.” Tyler held out his hand to help you up from the floor, which was becoming a bit harder than it was a week ago. “Goodbye Ger. I’m taking mom with me this time.”
“Tyler! Stop being so mean to him.”
“I’m not. We’re only going to be gone for a couple days. He’ll be fine, the sitter gets here in a couple hours and then he’ll be out playing fetch and digging holes in the yard.” He laced his fingers in yours, then started to pull you away from the dogs. “Come on, babe, we’re going to be late.”
“Bye Gerry, I’ll miss you.” You called out to the pup. Cash and Marshall followed you to the door, and you gave them a quick pet goodbye. With one last look at Gerry, Tyler closed the door and you got in the car, wiping away a few tears.
“Oh babe, we’re only going to be gone a few days. You know they love being with the sitter.”
“I know. I’m just an emotional wreck right now, with this little one.” You rubbed your hands over the baby.
“God, help us when we actually have to leave him or her for the first time.” A fresh set of tears welled up in your eyes. “Oh shit, I didn’t mean it. We’ll never leave them, I promise.” His thumb wiped away the remaining tears.
“I’m sorry. I’m an emotional train wreck these days.”
“It’s ok babe. Let’s just talk about all the fun stuff we’re going to do once we’re in Mexico.” The whole drive to the airport, you talked about taking long walks on the beach, relaxing in the sunshine and enjoying all the other treats Cabo had to offer.
The two of you were the last couple to reach the airport, Jamie and Jenna, as well as Anna and Bryan, were already on their waiting for you. In no time, all of you were on the plane headed off to sunny Mexico. The plane held about eight people on it, and you were snuggled up in a blanket sitting across from Anna with Jenna on the other side of the aisle, just chatting about your destination. You were so absorbed in your conversation you didn’t notice Tyler come up beside you. “Babe, why don’t you get up and walk around like the doctor said. Or better yet, go lay down on the couch with your feet up for a while.”
“Ty, the plane just took off. I just got settled, give it a few minutes.”
“And what if we hit turbulence in a few minutes. Come on babe get up.” He was pulling the blanket off of you, as you rolled your eyes over at Anna, who just laughed at the two of you. You walked around the small interior of the cabin for about five minutes then went and used the small restroom before going to sit back down. Tyler was on the couch and patted the seat next to him for you to sit at. The moment you sat down he pulled your legs over top his lap and urged you to lie back against the arm. “Comfy?” His hands were massaging your feet and legs which felt amazing and you sighed your contentment. You pulled the blanket Tyler had draped across the back of the couch around your shoulders, and let your eyes close. The motion of the plane had you asleep in moments.
You had no idea how long you had slept, but it only felt like minutes before Tyler was nudging you awake. “Babe, time to walk again.”
Checking your watch, you noticed that you’d napped about forty minutes. “Ty, are you serious? My feet are elevated, do you really think this is necessary?”
“Yes babe, the doctor told you to move as much as you could during the flight and it’s my job to make sure you do.” You knew he only had yours and the baby’s best interest at heart, and so you got up and walked around again. Which is how the rest of the flight went. The minute the plane touched down, you were all off and ready to enjoy the sunshine. Two black SUVs were there to take you to the villa the guys had rented.
The house was stunning in a modern architecture design, with breathtaking views of the ocean. In a few of the bedrooms, you could literally step out and have your toes in the sand. Tyler and Jamie had hired a personal chef so that no one would have to cook, and you were greeted with drinks and spread of Mexican foods out for your delight. Sitting outside on the patio, as the warm ocean breeze blew, you were halfway through an enchilada when Jamie plopped down beside you. “So everyone was talking and we think you and Tyler should have the master. After all…” His voice went down to a whisper. “This is your honeymoon.” You’d been lucky enough that no one had noticed the diamond band you continued to wear with your engagement ring, but you still weren’t ready for anyone else to know about your secret wedding.
“You didn’t tell anyone did you?”
“No! Never.” He blurted out and a couple people turned in your direction. “We just thought that with the baby coming, the two of you could use some alone time.”
“Awe, thanks, Jame. That’s sweet of you guys.”
“It’s no big deal. So, uh, anyways how are you feeling? No side effects from the plane ride or anything?”
You gave him a skeptical look before saying, “Did Tyler put you up to this?”
“No. I just don’t want to deliver a baby while we’re on vacation.” A fit of laughter hit you so hard, you thought you might fall over. It was probably from the visual Jamie put in your head.
Once you got yourself under control, you answered him. “I feel fine Jame, better than fine. This little one isn’t coming out for a few more weeks. Trust me.”
“Ok good.”
“Alright, what’s so funny over here,” Tyler asked sitting down with a huge plate of food.
You snuck a nacho from him. “Just Jamie delivering our baby."
Tyler choked then, and you slapped him on his back in an attempt to help him. He coughed and sputtered for a minute. “I’m sorry…you want Jamie to deliver our baby?”
A giggle left you. “No silly. You have him scared that I’m going to go into labor or something while we’re here.”
His coughing was finally under control now. “You feel fine right?”
“Yes, Ty. As I just told Jamie I feel fantastic.” You grabbed another nacho off his plate. “I’m going to go unpack.” You gave him a quick kiss, before heading off to the room.
“I’ll be over to help you as soon as I finish eating.”
“Take your time.” With that, you headed off to the master suite, where your bags had been put. You’d finished putting away all the clothes and were in the bathroom, changing into one of your bathing suits when Tyler finally came in.
“Woah! Babe, you look amazing.” You were wearing one of the two-piece bikinis the two of you bought. It made you feel a little self-conscious but then, these were your friends.
“Thanks, hun. I think everyone was saying they were going to down to the beach and I thought we’d join them.” You tossed the suit you had left out at him, then grabbed the sunscreen and started to slather it on your legs. When you made your way to your bump when Tyler stopped you.
“Here babe, let me do it.” On nights when he was home, he loved to rubbing your cocoa butter cream on your belly and talking to the baby, so it didn’t surprise you that he wanted to do the same thing now. “Hi baby, are you happy we’re on vacation?” He paused for a second, then looked up at you. “They said they were and to tell you that you should wear bikinis more often because mommy looks hot.”
All you could do was shake your head at your husband. The man would do anything to get you half-naked at times. “Oh really, the baby said that huh? Well, I’m pretty sure they told me daddy was a horndog, but I could’ve misinterpreted that one.”
Tyler laughed. “Nah, I’m pretty sure you got that one right.” He kissed you then, letting his hands roam your body and you melted into him. Unfortunately, Tyler pulled back. “Alright, if we don’t stop now, we’ll never get to the beach.”
He was completely correct, and it would be a shame to spend your first afternoon inside instead of enjoying the sun. “Fine, can you do my back too?” He spread the sunscreen across you and the two of you headed out to join the rest of your friends.
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mags-duranb · 7 years ago
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What did you think about fairy tail i REALLY DID NOT like what Hiro Hashima did with crime sorciere
Mmmh, that’s a very good question Anon san.
I have just read the chapter and uh, I am reeling a bit here and trying to order my thoughs before my attention gets shifted to something else because that’s my brain way to go. 
Why I think, indeed? 
(I rambled a lot about Fairy Tail but you can skip that, there is a subtitle about Crime Sorciere where I share my opinion about them :D)
About Fairy Tail. It had a good start and a very poor finale. I currently own the manga copies till Tenroushima arc and here I decided to stop buying them. Why?
Because in my very humble opinion, the meele battle between Natsu, Lucy, Erza, Gray and Wendy against Hades was the peak of Mashima’s writing. Even if Natsu delivered the final blow, Natsu wasn’t alone. 
After delivering a heartfelt speech about conquering fears, through acknowledging that having friends means to not shoulder them alone. 
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He raised their morale, he make then got back to their feet and conquer their fears head on, because they where friends and they weren’t alone.
Even if he was shaking and at his limit, he trusted his dear friends to help him to reach his goal.
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To give him that extra push he needed
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And go for it!!
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The end result of a superb sequence of cooperation between true friends!
THAT’S HOW YOU SHOW THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP
This fight was the perfect example of show don’t tell. It was a very satisfying sequence for me, because you can feel Natsu’s giving his all on that sole punch thanks to the combined efforts between comrades that got your back till the bitter end. 
Which a great contrast to what the series came to be in their last arcs, in which the characters keep screaming “FRIENDSHIP” as a magic formula to defeat the villain in turn (I am looking at you Natsu and Erza main ofenders you are!)  without anything to back them up about it. Something that in this media that relies on images more than words is quite preposterous. 
I don’t want just characters desperatelly trying to convince me through dialogues, I want to see that narrated through these manga panels! I want to see their friendship shining through effort and sacrifice and trust and moments of camaraderie. That’s how you engage an audience! 
Oh and this insistence of being a manga about friendship just backfired, as a friend said, he tried to go full circle but instead we got a stale cast and story, there were no grow, no consequences, everything went back to what it was before, minus the antagonists, those in an effort to keep things the same got killed/ became good guys/ received punishment/ etc. Nothing to fear, go on, everyone is happy, let’s party! the end. 
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!
Which brings  CRIME SORCIERE
If we talk about the end, I think we should take it  as a breaking point for all of them to regain their lives as true free people for the first time in years and a new start as individuals and don’t go deep or we gonna get headaches xD
But that’s just me. 
Crime Sorciere got lots of potential to be a great cast of characters on their own, but Mashima already confessed in one of his afterwords at the end of the GMG arc that he was not good at writing a big cast. Sooooo… If Fairy tail that was main cast got shafted pretty much in their own story and interactions, well, Crime Sorciere weren’t going to get any better than what we got here.
Honestly, I keep up with the manga for them, Jellal Fernandes and the Jerza. (Unashamed shipper I am)
We don’t even know at what point of the one year timeskip they got pardoned. What happened in between? Where are they now? Are they traveling? Are they searching for Richard’s brother? Is Kinana having a long distance relationship with Cobra? (you Mashima magnificent bastard you X_D ) How come Cobra and Kina have it and Jerza is just a mistery? 
Seriously, This is again the whole let’s keep stale and got not character developtment kind of thing, Erza who is supposed to be good friends with Lucy just keeps to herself about her status with Jellal, so we just can infere since we got the unrealiable narrator on Lucy what’s happening between these two.
Oh well, I will reserve the Jerza for another post. 
Coming back to Crime Sorciere, it leaves a lot of room to work with and honestly I think it could be worse. At least now they are free to go wherever they want although I have the feeling since this is all about frienship and a guild being a family that they will be together for a good time till they decide they are ready to part ways. I am getting a shit ton of headcanons about all of them.
Specially Jellal.
And talking about him, this is not a headcanon but more along the lines of what being pardoned means for him, even if Racer took it the simplistic way, Jellal only uttered the word “to live”, which I see it as a turning point for him.
It started when August told him about not trying to see life in just black and white, but as something defined by love where true justice relies (according to him)  and later on Erza asked him to start valuing his life.
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So I believe Jellal is reflecting about it and coming to terms with has been learnt in his own journey. It feels as regression but seeing how other characters got it, I suppose is not that bad in the end if he is starting to take things at his own pace to regain himself and go to Erza when he feels ready, because I think that’s the only reason they are keeping their distance and not dating and shit. 
They understand each other and if Erza is acting all girly (don’t give too much though about Erza combing her hair, that is just a way to tell she is just happy and very in love) Okay I leave the jerza for later xD
But yeah, that’s it. I am happy that at least Crime Sorciere got a happy ending and we got a lot of room to speculate about. 
THNAK YOU FOR THE ASK!
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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago
Text
The Inside Story of Reddit’s Redesign
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.
Welcome to Reddit, all grown up.
On Perez's first week at Reddit, Ohanian sent him a folder full of screenshots. Strung together, the images created an ad-hoc time-lapse of Reddit's design history. There was a view of the site just before launch, when it had only two users; u/kn0thing for Ohanian, u/spez for Huffman. (Already, u/kn0thing had negative karma, the result of u/spez downvoting his first post.) There was Reddit after it added comments in 2005, and after it added subreddits in 2008. There was Reddit during its most dramatic desktop redesign, also in 2008, which included new "momentum arrows" to show if a post was rising or falling, and new ways to sort posts. And then, abruptly, the screenshots stopped.
Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else.
It wasn't that Ohanian had failed to capture the last decade of Reddit's design history—though he did leave Reddit in 2009, along with Huffman. The problem was that there was no last decade of Reddit's design history.
In the intervening years, Reddit had changed drastically both as a company and as a website. After Ohanian and Huffman had left, the company cycled through new CEOs—one of whom quit because the job was too "stressful and draining," one of whom quit after suffering what she calls "one of the largest trolling attacks in history" by Reddit users. The website had swollen from just over 2 million users in 2008 to over 330 million. Those users brought with them a tide of new communities—some of which challenged Reddit's reputation for free speech in disturbing ways. The design, however, had been preserved in amber.
Ohanian sent the screenshots to Perez in a Zip file. "He was like, 'Well, I'm sorry. But this is your job now.'"
User’s can switch to a "Card view," which emphasizes photos and videos and is reminiscent of Facebook’s design.
Reddit
Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else. Never mind the fact that, besides Perez, the company didn't even have a design team. At Microsoft, where Perez had worked previously, he led a team of 60 designers. "I came here, there were four of us," he says. In those early days, Reddit's makeshift design team worked out of an empty room on the fourth floor of the company's headquarters. They dragged up a TV, a couple of chairs, a little Wi-Fi station, a bunch of paper, and started to hash out how to bring Reddit into the future.
Brainstorming was easy. Everyone wanted to change the font, the navigation, the use of space in the sidebars. They talked about making Reddit more visual, making better use of the unique personality of each community. "When you ask a designer, 'What would be your dream thing to change on the internet?' the answer is always: 'That Reddit thing needs a lot of love,'" says Perez.
Perez wasn't just a designer, though. He was also a Redditor—a longtime lurker, as he puts it. So he knew that Redditors are resourceful creatures. "By virtue of not having any significant product evolution in years, users end up doing a lot of things and figure out how to subsist on their own," he says. Ask any of Reddit's most active users how they browse the site, and they'll likely mention at least one third-party application. Reddit Enhancement Suite, one of the most popular tools, launched in 2010 to provide some the necessary features that Reddit's web client didn't. It's commonly used by Reddit's moderators, some of whom spend hours every day refereeing their online communities. The most engaged of the tribe, who moderate several communities, have dedicated hours to custom styling their subreddits in CSS, or coding bots to help "automod" their communities.
The design team took inspiration from these workarounds. Perez and his team spent hours every day, for weeks at a time, talking to moderators about the elaborate hacks they'd strung together to make Reddit work better. They asked some users to create diaries of how they'd used the site. They looked at Reddit's top 2,000 communities, and tracked the things their moderators had done to customize the style. "We had a massive spreadsheet of all the customizable things that all communities do," says Ben Rush, the UX design lead on the redesign. They distilled all of this data into a new set of tools like "post validation," which lets moderators easily create a filter for what can or can't be posted in a community, and a custom styling toolbox, which lets mods change the colors and banners on their subreddits with just a few clicks.
For most of the people Perez's team interviewed, these changes might feel redundant, or even tedious. Moderators running highly stylized subreddits, like r/GameOfThrones, already know how to make their communities feel unique. In fact, they've devoted hours to doing it. But for Redditors who've shied away from creating their own communities in the past, the new toolset democratizes the process. You don't need coding chops, or even a third-party add-on, to make something that looks and feels cool. That, for Reddit, represents the most important part of the redesign. It's not just bringing the site into 2018. It's preparing the site for the next generation of Redditors.
The first version of Reddit worked more or less like a link aggregator. It was a place for skimming the news, sharing memes, passing around lulz. Shortly after it first launched, the site introduced comments to encourage discussion on those links. The first comment? It was about how comments would ruin Reddit. In 2008, when the site launched subreddits, Redditors objected again, complaining that the new feature reflected Reddit's "schizophrenic approach" to displaying content. More changes followed: a bigger "comment" button, new ways to sort posts, those momentum arrows. You can guess how well those went over.
People on Reddit, like people everywhere on the internet, resist even the slightest changes. Redesigns almost always elicit atavistic rage—take it from Facebook, or Snapchat, or Digg. But on a site like Reddit, with 13 years of history baked into its current design, the resistance to change is higher than usual. As one user, u/vusys, put it in a comment to the design team: "The biggest misstep is taking a revolutionary approach instead of evolutionary. I agree that current reddit is kind of ugly, but it works."
For people who have been on Reddit for years, the obtuseness is part of the appeal. It engenders a sense of belonging. If you can figure it out, you get to be part of the club.
'It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit.'
Amulya Aradhyula, Reddit
But there's little charm for new users. Even making your first post can be bewildering. There are two buttons—"submit a new link" and "submit a new text post"—that blend in with the advertisements on the site's right rail. When you try to submit something, it's not immediately obvious where you're posting it or what the rules of that community might be. And if you want to make your own community? Well, good luck with that.
So while the design team worked to bring the redesign up to parity with Reddit's current features, another team started to look at what it would take to ease a new user's first encounter. While the site's users have always been extremely vocal about what they like (or really hate) about the design, Reddit had never actively polled anyone outside its own user community about the site's usability. A two-person UX research team was formed to figure out why people joined but never posted, or never joined at all.
Those researchers, Ajit Krishna and Amulya Aradhyula, started surveying people late last year. They sent online questionnaires and conducted interviews with Redditors, alongside the designers on Perez's team, but then they went further out. For a few hours each week, Krishna and Aradhyula carried their laptops into San Francisco's Union Square, where Krishna says they found a "nice distribution of people from all over the world just sitting around doing nothing." They'd walk up to someone on a park bench, show them a page on Reddit, and ask, "Does this make sense to you? Do you understand how to get from Point A to Point B?" They found that most people understood the concept of Reddit. They just didn't understand how to use it, or what they'd use it for.
"It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit," says Aradhyula. "There's so many places that they could go, but they're not aware that they exist."
The new design features an easier interface for posting text, images, video, and links.
Reddit
The research from Krishna and Aradhyula helped inform a new set of design choices aimed at breaking down that perception: Now, there's a bigger button to signal where you can create a post. Before, formatting text posts required the use of Markdown; now, there's a WYSIWYG toolbar too. Before, you couldn't combine text, images, and links in the same posts; now, you can roll them all into one, along with embedded movies. The new posting flow also surfaces the community guidelines of the subreddit you're posting to, which helps new users understand the rules so they don't accidentally get their post nuked. It's hard to imagine a Reddit veteran caring about any of this. But for someone brand new to the site, it's the difference between finding the confidence to make that first post or closing the tab, walking away, and never coming back.
Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all experience. "Lurkers" come to the site regularly to read content, but never post. Others post every day in the communities they know and love; others go on to create and moderate communities on the site. "Reddit is a very personal thing," says Perez. "We don't take any of that for granted. People should be able to customize it around themselves and the communities and the content they care about."
To make that possible, the redesign introduces three ways to browse the site: "Classic view" looks the most like Reddit did before. "Compact view" helps moderators scroll through bulk content quickly. "Card view" pre-expands content like photos and posts, which makes it easier to scroll through a feed like r/pics without having to click each individual post. (It looks a lot more like Facebook or Twitter, which Perez says is intentional. "For a lot of our new users, they like it. They come from those places.") Users can toggle between these three views at any time, offering a more customizable way to consume the content on the site. Now, there's no single way to use Reddit. There's no single redesign either.
The redesign aims to reintroduce Reddit as a modern destination on the internet. The company's branding, however, was stuck in 2005. "One of the things I did early on was do an audit of what Reddit had at the time," says Tavish MacLellan, Reddit's creative director for the brand. The "official" brand guidelines included a palette of colors, a logo, and Reddit's alien mascot Snoo. Those materials had Ohanian's personal email scrawled at the bottom, along with a note: "Have fun with this! If you use it somewhere online, email me."
This wasn't so much a brand "refresh" as it was building official branding from scratch. But a few things jumped out to MacLellan as iconic to Reddit: the orange-red color, and the alien, Snoo.
Snoo started as a doodle in one of Ohanian's notebooks, and later became the site's unofficial mascot. It has a football-shaped head, crooked antenna, a wide smile, and a pair of orange-red eyes. "The backstory on Snoo was that Snoo was this time-traveling alien," says Ohanian. In the early days of Reddit, that backstory provided a guarantee that the site would stay afloat. "If we failed, Snoo wouldn't be able to travel back to the present."
Early on, Redditors took Snoo and made it their own. Moderators uploaded user drawings of Snoo in various contexts to fit into individual communities. It came to symbolize Reddit, and Reddit's users—a figure that could become anyone, or anything. Reddit needed a better branding strategy, and Snoo seemed like the obvious anchor. "Alexis’s idea for Snoo was an alien that has arrived on Earth to discover humanity," says MacLellan. The question was: "How do we take Snoo the character and turn that into an actual icon that we can apply to Reddit?"
The team commissioned artists to illustrate a new Snoo. They matched Ohanian's original proportions, keeping the hand-drawn aesthetic but adding a more three-dimensional look. Snoo shows up across the redesigned website, as an icon in corners and in a new set of "Snoomoji" that users can use as flair and in chats on the site.
When you sign into Reddit chat, you're now assigned one of the Snoos as your avatar. And when you make a new community, the default banner image now shows one of several new illustrations of Snoo exploring a new planet. For legacy Redditors, Snoo is the familiar friend that's been with them all these years. For new users, Snoo is more of a guide to the Reddit universe. You may feel like an alien at first, but these planets can start to feel like home over time.
"Snoo is already entrenched within the existing Reddit userbase, and I think they'll be pleased to find Snoo is [still] a big part of it. But it's also an opportunity for the broader internet to have now an ambassador to the platform," says Ohanian. "I'm excited to see the new Snoo welcome a whole new generation of Redditors."
There's a room in Reddit's headquarters where the walls are filled with the design team's early mockups, an homage to the journey they've been on for the past year. The hypothetical versions of Reddit start off hyper-visual, then shrink back to hyper-minimal, with a range of wild design ideas in between. Many of the mockups borrow design language from other popular sites; you can see echoes of Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook bouncing around the room. From far away, very few of the mockups look recognizably like Reddit.
In one corner of the room, Perez pinned up some of the screenshots that Ohanian gave to him on his first week. And on the opposite wall, there's a printout of r/all in the design that Reddit will introduce today. If you stand in the middle of the room and look at the two walls from a distance, it's hard to tell the designs apart. Perez has led the biggest and most ambitious design overhaul in Reddit's history. And unless you squint, you can't really tell.
Rush, the UX designer, says the website they've built is the same Reddit—just a little more grown up. "[We're] making it simpler and more efficient, making it more accessible, but not altering the scaffolding," he says. "Our goal is, of course, not to dip in any type of action. You want the same, if not more, amount of comments; same, if not more, amount of posts."
But another goal goes much deeper: changing the constitution of the site, making it more welcoming to people who never thought they could find a home there before. On the new Reddit, we are all just aliens, exploring the vast community of foreign planets, trying to find our place in the universe.
Correction appended at 3 PM ET on 4/2/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the design team Diego Perez previously led at Microsoft. The team included 60 designers, not 160.
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Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/
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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago
Text
The Inside Story of Reddit’s Redesign
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.
Welcome to Reddit, all grown up.
On Perez's first week at Reddit, Ohanian sent him a folder full of screenshots. Strung together, the images created an ad-hoc time-lapse of Reddit's design history. There was a view of the site just before launch, when it had only two users; u/kn0thing for Ohanian, u/spez for Huffman. (Already, u/kn0thing had negative karma, the result of u/spez downvoting his first post.) There was Reddit after it added comments in 2005, and after it added subreddits in 2008. There was Reddit during its most dramatic desktop redesign, also in 2008, which included new "momentum arrows" to show if a post was rising or falling, and new ways to sort posts. And then, abruptly, the screenshots stopped.
Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else.
It wasn't that Ohanian had failed to capture the last decade of Reddit's design history—though he did leave Reddit in 2009, along with Huffman. The problem was that there was no last decade of Reddit's design history.
In the intervening years, Reddit had changed drastically both as a company and as a website. After Ohanian and Huffman had left, the company cycled through new CEOs—one of whom quit because the job was too "stressful and draining," one of whom quit after suffering what she calls "one of the largest trolling attacks in history" by Reddit users. The website had swollen from just over 2 million users in 2008 to over 330 million. Those users brought with them a tide of new communities—some of which challenged Reddit's reputation for free speech in disturbing ways. The design, however, had been preserved in amber.
Ohanian sent the screenshots to Perez in a Zip file. "He was like, 'Well, I'm sorry. But this is your job now.'"
User’s can switch to a "Card view," which emphasizes photos and videos and is reminiscent of Facebook’s design.
Reddit
Redesigning any major website is stressful. But redesigning one like Reddit, which hadn't been touched in over a decade, was something else. Never mind the fact that, besides Perez, the company didn't even have a design team. At Microsoft, where Perez had worked previously, he led a team of 60 designers. "I came here, there were four of us," he says. In those early days, Reddit's makeshift design team worked out of an empty room on the fourth floor of the company's headquarters. They dragged up a TV, a couple of chairs, a little Wi-Fi station, a bunch of paper, and started to hash out how to bring Reddit into the future.
Brainstorming was easy. Everyone wanted to change the font, the navigation, the use of space in the sidebars. They talked about making Reddit more visual, making better use of the unique personality of each community. "When you ask a designer, 'What would be your dream thing to change on the internet?' the answer is always: 'That Reddit thing needs a lot of love,'" says Perez.
Perez wasn't just a designer, though. He was also a Redditor—a longtime lurker, as he puts it. So he knew that Redditors are resourceful creatures. "By virtue of not having any significant product evolution in years, users end up doing a lot of things and figure out how to subsist on their own," he says. Ask any of Reddit's most active users how they browse the site, and they'll likely mention at least one third-party application. Reddit Enhancement Suite, one of the most popular tools, launched in 2010 to provide some the necessary features that Reddit's web client didn't. It's commonly used by Reddit's moderators, some of whom spend hours every day refereeing their online communities. The most engaged of the tribe, who moderate several communities, have dedicated hours to custom styling their subreddits in CSS, or coding bots to help "automod" their communities.
The design team took inspiration from these workarounds. Perez and his team spent hours every day, for weeks at a time, talking to moderators about the elaborate hacks they'd strung together to make Reddit work better. They asked some users to create diaries of how they'd used the site. They looked at Reddit's top 2,000 communities, and tracked the things their moderators had done to customize the style. "We had a massive spreadsheet of all the customizable things that all communities do," says Ben Rush, the UX design lead on the redesign. They distilled all of this data into a new set of tools like "post validation," which lets moderators easily create a filter for what can or can't be posted in a community, and a custom styling toolbox, which lets mods change the colors and banners on their subreddits with just a few clicks.
For most of the people Perez's team interviewed, these changes might feel redundant, or even tedious. Moderators running highly stylized subreddits, like r/GameOfThrones, already know how to make their communities feel unique. In fact, they've devoted hours to doing it. But for Redditors who've shied away from creating their own communities in the past, the new toolset democratizes the process. You don't need coding chops, or even a third-party add-on, to make something that looks and feels cool. That, for Reddit, represents the most important part of the redesign. It's not just bringing the site into 2018. It's preparing the site for the next generation of Redditors.
The first version of Reddit worked more or less like a link aggregator. It was a place for skimming the news, sharing memes, passing around lulz. Shortly after it first launched, the site introduced comments to encourage discussion on those links. The first comment? It was about how comments would ruin Reddit. In 2008, when the site launched subreddits, Redditors objected again, complaining that the new feature reflected Reddit's "schizophrenic approach" to displaying content. More changes followed: a bigger "comment" button, new ways to sort posts, those momentum arrows. You can guess how well those went over.
People on Reddit, like people everywhere on the internet, resist even the slightest changes. Redesigns almost always elicit atavistic rage—take it from Facebook, or Snapchat, or Digg. But on a site like Reddit, with 13 years of history baked into its current design, the resistance to change is higher than usual. As one user, u/vusys, put it in a comment to the design team: "The biggest misstep is taking a revolutionary approach instead of evolutionary. I agree that current reddit is kind of ugly, but it works."
For people who have been on Reddit for years, the obtuseness is part of the appeal. It engenders a sense of belonging. If you can figure it out, you get to be part of the club.
'It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit.'
Amulya Aradhyula, Reddit
But there's little charm for new users. Even making your first post can be bewildering. There are two buttons—"submit a new link" and "submit a new text post"—that blend in with the advertisements on the site's right rail. When you try to submit something, it's not immediately obvious where you're posting it or what the rules of that community might be. And if you want to make your own community? Well, good luck with that.
So while the design team worked to bring the redesign up to parity with Reddit's current features, another team started to look at what it would take to ease a new user's first encounter. While the site's users have always been extremely vocal about what they like (or really hate) about the design, Reddit had never actively polled anyone outside its own user community about the site's usability. A two-person UX research team was formed to figure out why people joined but never posted, or never joined at all.
Those researchers, Ajit Krishna and Amulya Aradhyula, started surveying people late last year. They sent online questionnaires and conducted interviews with Redditors, alongside the designers on Perez's team, but then they went further out. For a few hours each week, Krishna and Aradhyula carried their laptops into San Francisco's Union Square, where Krishna says they found a "nice distribution of people from all over the world just sitting around doing nothing." They'd walk up to someone on a park bench, show them a page on Reddit, and ask, "Does this make sense to you? Do you understand how to get from Point A to Point B?" They found that most people understood the concept of Reddit. They just didn't understand how to use it, or what they'd use it for.
"It's difficult to figure out for a lot of folks where exactly they can fit in on Reddit," says Aradhyula. "There's so many places that they could go, but they're not aware that they exist."
The new design features an easier interface for posting text, images, video, and links.
Reddit
The research from Krishna and Aradhyula helped inform a new set of design choices aimed at breaking down that perception: Now, there's a bigger button to signal where you can create a post. Before, formatting text posts required the use of Markdown; now, there's a WYSIWYG toolbar too. Before, you couldn't combine text, images, and links in the same posts; now, you can roll them all into one, along with embedded movies. The new posting flow also surfaces the community guidelines of the subreddit you're posting to, which helps new users understand the rules so they don't accidentally get their post nuked. It's hard to imagine a Reddit veteran caring about any of this. But for someone brand new to the site, it's the difference between finding the confidence to make that first post or closing the tab, walking away, and never coming back.
Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all experience. "Lurkers" come to the site regularly to read content, but never post. Others post every day in the communities they know and love; others go on to create and moderate communities on the site. "Reddit is a very personal thing," says Perez. "We don't take any of that for granted. People should be able to customize it around themselves and the communities and the content they care about."
To make that possible, the redesign introduces three ways to browse the site: "Classic view" looks the most like Reddit did before. "Compact view" helps moderators scroll through bulk content quickly. "Card view" pre-expands content like photos and posts, which makes it easier to scroll through a feed like r/pics without having to click each individual post. (It looks a lot more like Facebook or Twitter, which Perez says is intentional. "For a lot of our new users, they like it. They come from those places.") Users can toggle between these three views at any time, offering a more customizable way to consume the content on the site. Now, there's no single way to use Reddit. There's no single redesign either.
The redesign aims to reintroduce Reddit as a modern destination on the internet. The company's branding, however, was stuck in 2005. "One of the things I did early on was do an audit of what Reddit had at the time," says Tavish MacLellan, Reddit's creative director for the brand. The "official" brand guidelines included a palette of colors, a logo, and Reddit's alien mascot Snoo. Those materials had Ohanian's personal email scrawled at the bottom, along with a note: "Have fun with this! If you use it somewhere online, email me."
This wasn't so much a brand "refresh" as it was building official branding from scratch. But a few things jumped out to MacLellan as iconic to Reddit: the orange-red color, and the alien, Snoo.
Snoo started as a doodle in one of Ohanian's notebooks, and later became the site's unofficial mascot. It has a football-shaped head, crooked antenna, a wide smile, and a pair of orange-red eyes. "The backstory on Snoo was that Snoo was this time-traveling alien," says Ohanian. In the early days of Reddit, that backstory provided a guarantee that the site would stay afloat. "If we failed, Snoo wouldn't be able to travel back to the present."
Early on, Redditors took Snoo and made it their own. Moderators uploaded user drawings of Snoo in various contexts to fit into individual communities. It came to symbolize Reddit, and Reddit's users—a figure that could become anyone, or anything. Reddit needed a better branding strategy, and Snoo seemed like the obvious anchor. "Alexis’s idea for Snoo was an alien that has arrived on Earth to discover humanity," says MacLellan. The question was: "How do we take Snoo the character and turn that into an actual icon that we can apply to Reddit?"
The team commissioned artists to illustrate a new Snoo. They matched Ohanian's original proportions, keeping the hand-drawn aesthetic but adding a more three-dimensional look. Snoo shows up across the redesigned website, as an icon in corners and in a new set of "Snoomoji" that users can use as flair and in chats on the site.
When you sign into Reddit chat, you're now assigned one of the Snoos as your avatar. And when you make a new community, the default banner image now shows one of several new illustrations of Snoo exploring a new planet. For legacy Redditors, Snoo is the familiar friend that's been with them all these years. For new users, Snoo is more of a guide to the Reddit universe. You may feel like an alien at first, but these planets can start to feel like home over time.
"Snoo is already entrenched within the existing Reddit userbase, and I think they'll be pleased to find Snoo is [still] a big part of it. But it's also an opportunity for the broader internet to have now an ambassador to the platform," says Ohanian. "I'm excited to see the new Snoo welcome a whole new generation of Redditors."
There's a room in Reddit's headquarters where the walls are filled with the design team's early mockups, an homage to the journey they've been on for the past year. The hypothetical versions of Reddit start off hyper-visual, then shrink back to hyper-minimal, with a range of wild design ideas in between. Many of the mockups borrow design language from other popular sites; you can see echoes of Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook bouncing around the room. From far away, very few of the mockups look recognizably like Reddit.
In one corner of the room, Perez pinned up some of the screenshots that Ohanian gave to him on his first week. And on the opposite wall, there's a printout of r/all in the design that Reddit will introduce today. If you stand in the middle of the room and look at the two walls from a distance, it's hard to tell the designs apart. Perez has led the biggest and most ambitious design overhaul in Reddit's history. And unless you squint, you can't really tell.
Rush, the UX designer, says the website they've built is the same Reddit—just a little more grown up. "[We're] making it simpler and more efficient, making it more accessible, but not altering the scaffolding," he says. "Our goal is, of course, not to dip in any type of action. You want the same, if not more, amount of comments; same, if not more, amount of posts."
But another goal goes much deeper: changing the constitution of the site, making it more welcoming to people who never thought they could find a home there before. On the new Reddit, we are all just aliens, exploring the vast community of foreign planets, trying to find our place in the universe.
Correction appended at 3 PM ET on 4/2/2018: An earlier version of this article misstated the size of the design team Diego Perez previously led at Microsoft. The team included 60 designers, not 160.
Related Video
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Learn to Fold Five Insanely Cool Paper Planes
John Collins, the Paper Airplane Guy, shows how to fold five amazing paper planes: the Boomerang, the Boomerang 2, the Bat Plane, the Tumbling Wing, and the World Record Plane (a.k.a. "Suzanne"). Read more about the Paper Airplane Guy at WIRED.com: https://ift.tt/2J7ifiI You can also visit his website for more information: https://ift.tt/2k3a3Yd
Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/
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