Atlassian’s branding history traces a company’s evolution about as clearly as a logo can, from a literal illustration of the mythological figure its name comes from, through a stick figure caught up in a design trend it wanted to distance itself from, to a clean, abstract mountain that now represents a genuinely global software business.
Two University Friends and a Maxed Out Credit Card
Atlassian was founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, two graduates of the University of New South Wales in Sydney who had met while studying together. The company was famously bootstrapped, with the founders maxing out the $10,000 limit on a personal credit card to get the business off the ground rather than seeking outside investment.
The pair had originally been providing outside support to other companies’ software teams, and grew frustrated with the bug tracking tool they were using themselves, eventually building their own in house tool and naming it Jira, a playful reference to Gojira, the Japanese title for the original 1954 Godzilla film. They soon realised there was a bigger opportunity in selling Jira itself to other businesses rather than continuing to offer support services, and Atlassian was born from that pivot.
Named After a Titan
The Atlassian name comes directly from Atlas, the Titan of Greek mythology condemned to hold up the heavens on his shoulders, a reference to the company’s original identity built around supporting other businesses. The first Atlassian logo reflected this literally, depicting a stick figure man holding a cycloidal, sky like structure above his head with both arms outstretched.
Moving Away From the Stick Figure
Atlassian redesigned its logo in 2011, largely because the outstretched arms motif of the original mark had become a genuinely common visual trend across the tech industry at the time, with a number of other brands adopting similar imagery, diluting how distinctive the symbol actually was for Atlassian specifically. This is a useful example of a logo needing to change not because it stopped working on its own terms, but because the surrounding design landscape had caught up with it, reducing its ability to stand out.
The 2017 Mountain Redesign
In May 2017, Atlassian introduced its current logo, a simplified blue mountain icon paired with custom typography, designed by Australian agency Re. The mark was chosen specifically to represent the idea of helping teams reach their peak potential through collaboration software, a much more abstract, forward looking concept than the literal Atlas imagery the company had carried since its founding.
The redesign deliberately moved away from gradients in favour of flat, simplified design principles, chosen specifically to work cleanly across the wide range of product interfaces the mountain mark needed to appear in, from Bitbucket’s code repository screens to Confluence’s documentation pages. By this point, the mountain logo needed to represent a business that had expanded well beyond its original Jira product into a genuinely broad portfolio including Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello, all needing to sit consistently under one recognisable brand.
Individual Products, One Consistent Identity
Atlassian’s individual products carry their own distinct logos, Jira among them, developed by a specialist creative team that included a typographer for the wordmark and separate specialists for illustration and overall brand design, deliberately moving away from any lingering visual references to the original Atlas imagery across the product family. This layered approach, one mountain identity for the parent company, distinct marks for individual products underneath it, reflects the genuine complexity of managing a brand across a large, diversified software portfolio.
What Atlassian’s Story Teaches Other Businesses
Atlassian’s journey from a literal mythological illustration to an abstract mountain icon shows how a founding story can inspire a logo without needing to be depicted literally forever. The mountain retains a conceptual link back to the Atlas name, without relying on imagery that had become genuinely common across the wider tech industry. For a growing business, that’s a useful principle, a logo can carry meaning from your origin story without needing to illustrate it directly.
About Business Logo Design Australia
Business Logo Design Australia designs custom logos for businesses across the country, from new startups to established businesses going through a rebrand. Every project starts with a real conversation about your business, followed by original concepts, a set number of revisions, and a complete set of final files ready for web, print, signage and everyday use. Pricing is laid out clearly before you commit to a package, so you always know what’s included.
Turning Your Story Into a Symbol
If your business has a founding story worth telling, a good logo can reference it without illustrating it literally, the way Atlassian’s mountain evolved from its original Atlas imagery. Business Logo Design Australia can help you find that same kind of meaningful, lasting symbol.