Bitmoji is going back to 2D.
Snapchat announced Monday that a new Bitmoji style inspired by the classic 2D look will be an option for Snapchat+ subscribers in the coming days. The revamped style for the app’s popular avatars is called Comic Bitmoji.
Bitmoji’s 3D redesign in 2023 allowed Snapchat to launch new body types and deliver faster on top fashion requests, from low-rise jeans to saris, says Swetha Dhamodharan, a senior product director at Snapchat.
But there’s been growing calls to bring back the old 2D comic style. One online petition to bring back the style has racked up nearly 100,000 signatures.
“I think that there’s just a little bit of nostalgia, and the avatar is cute,” Dhamodharan tells Fast Company. “We’ve done a lot of work to make it cuter over time.”
Also key are the wide variability of customizable traits, from hair styles to clothes, which make a friend’s or family member’s Bitmoji, though cartoonish and exaggerated, so easy to clock.
That same volume of variability, though, also makes the redesign projects from 2D to 3D and back again technically complex. The design process included iteration across a range of body shapes and sizes and fashion items. “The scale of our traits is enormous,” Dhamodharan says.
Bitmoji are central to the Snapchat experience and show up across the app in different ways, like as the avatar of the person you’re talking to instead of just initials, or on the app’s Snap Map, which reached 400 million users this year. That means animations had to look right as both a profile picture and full body. The team made tweaks to get the proportions, shading, and the thickness of outlines just right.
The option for a classic-inspired 2D Bitmoji style comes one week after Snapchat’s parent company Snap announced a partnership with Perplexity AI and said its revenue was up 10% year-over-year.
“Bitmoji is so important to Snapchat and what makes it so different,” Dhamodharan says. “It’s not this avatar that you create once and then you kind of forget about. It’s truly how you see yourself, it’s how you see your friends and family. And I think it just makes communicating on Snapchat feel complete different anymore connected than other places.”
