Two Salesforce colleagues, 2009.

Okta began under another name. Wikipedia says the company was co-founded in 2009 as SaaSure Inc. by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, who had worked together at Salesforce, and that it changed its name to Okta in 2010. The company is based in San Francisco, the city that the trade press named as its home when it opened for business.

That opening was reported at the time. CSO, in an article by Bob Violino dated 28 January 2011, said a new security company created by former Salesforce.com executives had begun operations that week, offering an on-demand identity and access management service meant to help companies adopt cloud-based applications. The article named McKinnon as chief executive and co-founder, describing him as a former head of engineering at Salesforce.com, and Kerrest as president and co-founder, who had worked in sales and business development there. The service was called the Okta Application Network, and CSO said it gave staff single sign-on to web applications while letting companies control access and analyse usage centrally.

The new name came from the sky. Wikipedia says the company took the name Okta from the meteorological unit for cloud cover. In meteorology, Wikipedia explains, an okta describes how much of the sky is covered by cloud, counted in eighths, from 0 oktas for a completely clear sky to 8 oktas for a completely overcast one. On weather charts the readings are drawn as symbols inside small circles rather than written as numbers. The short four-letter word replaced SaaSure within about a year of the founding and became the lowercase wordmark that the company still uses in refined form.

The company grew under that name. Wikipedia dates Okta’s listing on the Nasdaq exchange to 2017, and says it runs an annual user conference called Oktane, a name built on its own. Wikipedia also says the company’s services are built on the Amazon Web Services cloud.

A lighter wordmark and the Aura.

The current look came from a rebrand that Okta carried out with the agency Athletics. Athletics describes the project on its website as a collaboration between the agency and Okta’s internal brand team, and lists its role as brand identity, concept development, art direction, motion graphics, video direction, physical environments and exhibitions, and brand writing. Brand New, the identity blog published by UnderConsideration, noted the work on 21 August 2023 under the headline “New Logo and Identity for Okta by Athletics and In-house”, tagging it circular, icon and lowercase.

The wordmark was refined rather than replaced. Athletics says it streamlined the existing lowercase Okta wordmark with several changes: a lighter weight, sharper edges, a firmer base for the “t”, an updated “k” and a general gain in clarity, while keeping the character of the original. For further small refinements to the letters, the agency says, it partnered with Dalton Maag.

The symbol changed more. Athletics says it refreshed the Okta brand symbol and named it the Aura, describing it as the centrepiece around which the whole identity system can revolve. The agency says the Aura is made of spokes, or “facets”, that can be filled with images to create a layered effect when animated, and that the symbol can also be used on its own as an icon across the touchpoints of the product. The wider system, as Athletics describes it, adds warm, casual portrait photography, a refreshed tone of voice with a new voice guide and sample headlines, and a graphic system built around the Aura.

Product icons followed a few weeks after Brand New’s note. In a post on the Okta blog dated 3 October 2023, Mimi Chakravorti, the company’s vice president of brand, introduced new icons for its two product lines, Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud. She wrote that the company was reflecting in its visual system how it had grown since acquiring Auth0 in 2021, and that the Customer Identity Cloud icon, for the line sold as “powered by Auth0”, is an evolution of the Auth0 logo. The result is a family in which one company name sits over two product marks, one of which grows out of an acquired brand’s logo.

Sign-in screens, icons and the sky.

Enterprise software sells something nobody can hold, so its identity has to work on surfaces many consumer brands never think about. The name is the starting point. Some companies coin a word with no prior meaning, which clears trademark searches and domain registration but leaves the brand to build every association from scratch. Others borrow an ordinary word or a fragment of a phrase, which lends a ready image but invites confusion with everything else that shares it.

Mascots and illustrated characters appear more often than the sector’s sober reputation suggests. A friendly figure can soften a product built around tickets, workflows or compliance, though many are quietly retired once a company starts courting larger buyers.

The real brand surfaces are often screens. A login page, an empty dashboard, an error message and a notification email are seen far more often than any advertisement, and their colour, spacing and type do much of the identity work day to day. Annual user conferences add a third surface: the stage set, the keynote slides and the lanyard all carry the system in front of a live audience, which is why many enterprise identities are tested at scale in a convention hall.

One name, two product lines.

Okta today is a listed company headquartered in San Francisco. Wikipedia says it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Auth0 in March 2021 and closed the deal in May 2021; it went on to buy atSpoke in August 2021, the security firm Spera in December 2023 and Axiom Security, a provider of privileged access management, in September 2025. Wikipedia also says Okta signed on as an official partner of McLaren in January 2025 in a multi-year deal.

Auth0 kept its name inside the group. The October 2023 blog post presented Customer Identity Cloud as “powered by Auth0”, so the acquired brand continued to appear beside the parent rather than being retired. That gives the Okta identity two layers: the lowercase wordmark and the Aura for the company, and a pair of product icons beneath them, one of which carries forward the look of the Auth0 logo.

For a designer the Okta story is a case of a name chosen early and kept. The company dropped SaaSure within about a year, and the weather word it picked in 2010 has carried through a public listing, several acquisitions and a redesign, with the 2023 work refining the letters rather than replacing them. The Aura gave the identity a symbol that can be animated, filled with photographs or reduced to an icon, while the wordmark stayed recognisably the same four letters.

The palette on this page takes its cue from the sky in the company’s name: a pale sky blue, a cobalt and a night tone, with a cloud-white tint for grounds.

For a design guide, Okta shows how a short borrowed word can be refined over time, and how a symbol can be built to carry images as well as stand alone. Compare Workday, another enterprise software brand, and Cisco, a technology company whose identity pairs a symbol with a short name. For this guide we use sky, cobalt and night with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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