The best logos say more than one thing at once. Atlassian’s “A” is engineered to say three.

When Atlassian unveiled its new mark in 2017 — a rebrand handled in-house, not by an outside agency — it came with a deliberately layered story. The “A” is meant to read as a mountain (a summit for teams to climb), as two people high-fiving, and as the letter A formed from two pillars that lean on and reinforce each other. All three readings point at the same idea: teamwork. That’s the whole company in one glyph — Atlassian makes software (Jira, Confluence, Trello) that helps teams work together, and the logo argues the case before you read a word.

The name and the first logo both came from a Greek titan holding up the sky.

Atlassian was named after Atlas, and its 2002 original identity — a blue figure nicknamed “Charlie” — literally showed the titan holding up an arc of sky. Over the years the mark was abstracted (a 2011 version introduced a green accent), until the 2017 redesign retired Charlie entirely for the cleaner blue “A.” A further refresh developed with Pentagram arrived in 2024, flattening the mountain further. The through-line is consistent: a brand that keeps simplifying the same core metaphor rather than reinventing it.

A confident corporate blue, most often shown as a gradient. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The long-documented brand blue is Atlassian Blue #0052CC, the value most people know from the Atlassian Design System. Worth flagging: the refreshed system now sets its primary brand blue to #1868DB, so both are “real,” from different eras. The mark is usually presented over a blue gradient (roughly #0052CC into a brighter #2684FF), balanced by a deep neutral navy #172B4D for text. It’s a textbook enterprise-software palette — trustworthy, calm, unmistakably “productivity blue.”

The bespoke typeface is named after the old logo it replaced — a nice bit of brand memory.

The 2017 rebrand introduced Charlie Sans, a custom typeface designed by James Edmondson at OH no Type Co — and named, fondly, after “Charlie,” the nickname of Atlassian’s original logo. It comes in Charlie Display and Charlie Text, is exclusive to Atlassian, and was briefed for “friendliness, optimism and a bit of quirk” — the personality the whole brand aims for. (The product interfaces themselves now use a separate family, Atlassian Sans, with Atlassian Mono for code.) The specimen below is set in a comparable friendly sans.

Everything in Atlassian’s system exists to make one abstract promise — that software helps teams work better together — feel concrete.

Atlassian sells collaboration tools — Jira, Confluence, Trello — and the identity is engineered to state that thesis before a single feature is described. The layered “A” reads as a summit to climb together, two people high-fiving, and two pillars leaning into each other, and all three readings resolve to the same word: teamwork. That is a rare thing for a logo to pull off, because a mark that tries to mean several things usually ends up meaning nothing; Atlassian’s works because every interpretation points the same direction. The lineage matters too — the name comes from the titan Atlas holding up the sky, and the original 2002 figure “Charlie” did exactly that — so even the abstraction to a clean blue letterform kept the founding metaphor of bearing a shared load.

The supporting kit reinforces the message rather than decorating it. Atlassian Blue, usually shown as a confident gradient into a brighter sky tone, is textbook “productivity blue” — calm, trustworthy, unmistakably enterprise — while the bespoke Charlie Sans, briefed for “friendliness, optimism and a bit of quirk” and named after the retired logo, keeps the tone human so the software never feels like cold infrastructure. The pattern across Atlassian’s redesigns is telling: rather than chase novelty, it keeps simplifying the same idea, flattening the mountain and refining the blue through 2017 and again with Pentagram in 2024. For a company whose product is coordination, that disciplined continuity is the point — a brand that practises the consistency it sells.

Keep Atlassian’s system on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.