Adobe wanted to ignite the next generation of creators. To prove that the process of creativity is as important as the outcome. To make creativity accessible to all.

r/Layer was an experiment in 2019. A community anchored around a blank canvas. Pick some pixels, draw a Layer, and see where the Internet takes it. Think Photoshop as a multiplayer game, open to anyone with an Internet connection. It ended up being the best branded project we'd ever run on Reddit, period.

Then 2020 happened. A global sh*tshow. With the world isolated, we needed community more than ever. The return of r/Layer was no longer a question of "if", but "when". But sequels suck, right? This couldn't be a sophomore slump. How do you top your best campaign ever?

Community Empowerment.

Adobe's r/Layer is the only community among Reddit's 100,000+ active communities with built-in tools for scaleable, real-time creative collaboration. A living, breathing, digital canvas. For a week you could choose from 18 themed canvases and draw your own masterpiece or build on someone else's.

Layer 1 was beautiful chaos - a single canvas full of disparate Layers stacked on top of each other, ranked in order of date published.

Layer 2 would be an art revolution built to empower community expression, Layers ordered not by time stamps, but collective taste.

If Reddit is a community of communities, how could Layer 2 better reflect that? With a canvas of canvasses - each representing a different Reddit community.

The r/Layer community synthesizing to express their personal and collective identities in harmony.

An art platform created and curated, by the community.

Adobe believes in Creativity for All. So it set out to target the next generation of creators.

Reddit has over 430 million monthly active users worldwide. 58% aged between 18-34. 44% daily user growth YoY. Over 100k communities. Few platforms offer this global scale and momentum with Adobe's core target audience.

By marrying the power of creativity in Adobe's DNA with the power of community in Reddit's we would be able to experiment in a way that no one else could.

After a year of people begging for the canvas' return, we teased exactly that through social channels and targeted messaging across Reddit's wealth of creative communities. We then confirmed it with the r/Layer community and gave them the power to decide the canvas themes. We added a Layer button to the homepage, held our collective breath, and went live.

A herculean effort - collaboration across Product, Design, Brand, Creative and Special Project teams at Reddit & Adobe.

9 months from idea exploration to final execution.

To give true ownership to the community, we had to translate the democratic content ranking framework native to Reddit into a live art environment.

Hundreds of pieces of art a minute. Thousands of votes a second. High volume moderation tools sitting between. Building a dynamic reordering framework that rendered in real time, whilst still maintaining an effective caching strategy across mobile and desktop was no simple feat.

Egg-gang, flags and the Windows home-screen were a few standout trends, from literally hundreds. We added 8 additional canvasses throughout the week. People wrote their own code to augment Layer in directions we never imagined.

The community ran with it and made it their own, just as we'd hoped.

A community built on creativity.

We gave the world space to connect and collaborate through art during one of the most isolated periods of human history.

Multiple themed-canvasses gave people a shared sense of direction and resulted in incredibly cohesive collective ideas coming together.

Voting ability meant that Layers crafted with love rose to the top of the canvas, creating a flywheel of people putting more effort into their art - increasing the over all quality exponentially, whilst simultaneously reducing moderated Layers by 46% YoY.

In addition:

- r/Layer was the #1 community on Reddit the week it was live.

- +130% User Engagement YoY

- 7.1 million visits to the canvas.

- 85k+ Layers created

- 111k+ Total Hours