Neighbourhood app Nextdoor relaunches with new brand and product design

Neighbourhood app Nextdoor is relaunching with a new product design and brand identity to reboot its mission to connect local communities.

Launched in the US in 2011, it came to the UK in 2016, and has ten million verified users here – one in four UK adults. But the app seemed to lose its way, becoming known above all for sending too many emails, few of which seemed particularly relevant.

Nextdoor’s co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia calls this relaunch “a refounding moment” for the company.

For chief design officer Georg Petschnigg, it was a dual challenge – to create the UI that would serve Nextdoor’s newly focused offerings, and to rebuild the brand in a way that tackled people’s “preconceived notions.”

Petschnigg, who was previously head of product design at The New York Times, was animated by a deep belief in what the app is trying to do on a local level.

“The Times is an organisation that provides the world with great stories and reliable information,” he says. “But it does so at a very high altitude, through stories of global importance. The information you need, that has an immediate impact on your life, sits right outside your window, or just around the corner.”

Speaking with Tolia and co-founder Sarah Leary, Petschnigg was convinced that Nextdoor needed to return to its hyper-local roots, and become much more of a utility, to, “make the information that lives in your neighbourhood more actionable and more relevant to you.”

The new product design is built around three pillars – News, Alerts and Faves.

For News, Nextdoor is partnering with 3,500 trusted news sources and serving relevant reads pinpointed to a user’s location. The UX is designed to encourage comments and conversation around these stories, rather than presenting articles as “a finished thing.”

Alerts pulls real-time updates from official sources to update people about traffic disruption, weather forecasts, fires, break-ins and more.

Faves uses AI to answer users’ questions and provide local recommendations, by parsing the community’s previous posts on that topic. “It’s the magic and wizardry of AI, but it’s using that to actually connect people, which I am particularly excited about,” Petschnigg explains.

There is a floating navigation bar throughout the new app that feels similar to Apple’s much-discussed Liquid Glass interface. The idea, Petschnigg says, is to hero the content by paring back the wayfinding elements.

To accompany the new product design, Nextdoor needed a new brand identity, and Petschnigg says it was important not to shy away from its previous reputation.

“Historically, Nextdoor had a terrible Net Promoter Score,” he admits. “But there’s no need to be all doom and gloom about that.

“You need to acknowledge the problem, and understand what needs to change. Because while people saw its shortcomings, they want Nextdoor to be better, because they want their neighbourhoods to be better.”

He said these conversations started at a leadership level, and the team wrote a new manifesto to capture and communicate what the platform should be, and why it mattered.

“In a world fixated on what’s trending out there, we may not see what’s happening right here,” it reads. “We scroll by the entire world each day, and miss the neighbourhood stroll just steps away.”

“Writing was a great tool to tell our new story,” Petschnigg says. “It gave us a set of values which became the guiding light for the new brand identity.”

The Nextdoor brand was last refreshed in 2021, to accompany its IPO. “The idea at the time was to signal more kindness in the world,” Petschnigg explains. “But you really need to build the product up, create the utility and the value, and then kindness is the result.

“And so, in many ways, it was back to the studs. Let’s just take this down, and develop an aesthetic that’s much cleaner, sharper, and more efficient, that leads with utility. We deliberately pared-back the design to let the neighbourhoods shine.”

The house logo has had what he calls “some loving renovations.” The team experimented with identities featuring multiple houses, but decided in the end the single home worked best, as it’s “the unit that neighbourhoods get built from.”

The house is also used a framing device, as a container or a die-cut, to make interesting lay-outs.

The typeface is Saans, from Dutch foundry Displaay, chosen for its “modern, legible design” and no secondary fonts are used, to create consistency across “a single graphic family.”

The colour palette dials down the previous use of lime green in favour of a darker and more mature Lawn, combined with accent colours like Plaster off-white, and Dusk blue. There are also neighbourhood colour palettes, featuring Blush pink, Vista blue and Orange Dust, among others. These will feed into the designs of each user’s app, based on their location.

“This palette pulls from the expressiveness that we find in different neighbourhoods,” Petschnigg says. “They are inspired by specific surroundings – the glass and steel of cities, or the terracottas of national parks.”

In the art direction, a heavy emphasis on illustration was swapped out for photography, again to put real people front and centre in the new visual system.

There is a solidity to the new designs, underpinned by a willingness to show how it can be useful to people, rather than shouting about it. “You’re not going to come to Nextdoor because of the logo,” Petschnigg says. “You’re going to come because it does something valuable in your neighbourhood.”

There is also, he believes, a quiet sense of hope threaded through the new identity.

“It’s so easy to get downtrodden and disheartened. But we believe that when neighbours start talking, good things will come from it. It’s a very optimistic view of the world.”

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