AtlassianCopied

Atlassian's original logo, created in 2002 by co-founder Cannon-Brookes himself, showed Atlas holding up the sky, a figure he chose to represent service and support. By 2017 the company said it had grown to stand for bigger ideas around teamwork and team potential, and it needed a system for more than 14 products plus future acquisitions.

The new symbol is an abstract A. Atlassian invited several readings: two people high-fiving, a mountain for teams to climb, or two pillars supporting each other. The company paid tribute to the old figure, nicknamed Charlie, in the system's naming and in the A of the wordmark. Each product got a related mark that sits under the parent brand.

The rebrand covered more than 14 products. Each product logo was anchored in a value; Jira Software's began as code brackets and evolved into a mark for teams working in iterative cycles. A new typeface, Charlie Sans, named after the old Atlas logo's nickname, balances legibility with personality, and JIRA in capitals became Jira.

The work was done in-house.

The Register mocked the copy under the headline that Atlassian kills God and rebrands as a mountain, a structurally unsound A or a high five. On Reddit designers called the symbolism puffery but liked the system and typeface. The lasting complaint came from users: a year later people on Atlassian's own community said the product icons were hard to tell apart, with Jira and Bitbucket easily confused.

On the company blog, Cannon-Brookes framed the brand as a continuous project that is never totally done, and tied it to a growing family, greeting the newly added Trello and Statuspage. At its heart, he wrote, was a belief in working open: when work is open, the full potential of teams is unleashed, and silos between people and information come down. Building an identity around openness is a sensible story for collaboration software, though it is the same story every collaboration company tells.

Cannon-Brookes called the new logo friendly, human and a reflection of the company's personality, the same reasons he liked the old one. The system is the real achievement. Atlassian's products had looked like a collection of acquisitions, and this made them read as one family. The mark itself is pleasant but generic; it is the kind of abstract shape that needs a paragraph of symbolism to feel specific.