TrelloCopied

Trello spent its first decade as the friendly kanban board: lists, cards, a blue logo that drew the product itself. Atlassian bought it in 2017, and by early 2021 co-founder Michael Pryor said it had well over 50 million users. The pandemic had turned it into many people's new office, and Pryor described a work landscape littered with a graveyard of tried-and-tossed tools.

On 16 February 2021 Trello announced what it called the beginning of a whole new Trello. Engadget described it as a once-in-a-decade refresh. Most of the substance was product: timeline, calendar, table and dashboard views, plus link, board and mirror cards that pull in previews from Google Drive, YouTube, Dropbox and other services, and a sidebar reorganised by workspace.

The brand moved with it. The Verge reported a visual overhaul of both the logo and the illustrations used across the website and apps, and Atlassian's own announcement framed the new logo and brand as the culmination of the redesign, the first in ten years.

The reaction was mostly about features. Trade coverage treated the logo as a footnote to the views and cards, which says something about how little it changed and how much the product had.

Business Insider talked to co-founder Michael Pryor a few days later, nearly four years after Atlassian's $425 million acquisition. He described a goal of moving beyond tracking individual projects towards becoming a central hub for getting work done, and noted that the team had been largely remote from the start. TechCrunch, for its part, counted more than 30 new card types that preview links from YouTube, Google Drive, Figma and Jira. The new logo is the least of it; the real change is a whiteboard trying to become a dashboard, and the refreshed identity is there to make that feel friendly.

That restraint is right for Trello. Trello's logo has always been a literal picture of the board, and keeping that idea makes the product legible at a glance. The refresh makes the brand look more like a grown-up Atlassian product and less like a startup side project, which is exactly what a tool chasing business plans needed. It also costs Trello some of the hand-made charm that made it feel different from Jira.