Felix - I think he meant that the whole debacle around this issue even existing is pointless, not the issue itself

Hey John, I would recommend you to read the whole topic as there are a lot of explanations why it is not pointless...
If you have Enterprise/Corporate Rules for Design it can be that you "violate" these rules by using the new atlassian versions with rounded logos... That's sadly causing trouble for enterprise admins. If you company is smaller than 500 people you may see it as pointless...

I wish it would be this easy as you think

Why oh why can't you just leave the logos alone? This is so pointless!

Wow, I went overseas for a bit over a week, and it seems I missed some excitement here.

I agree, this isn't a fix - plus even if it was, how will this work for the 200+ spaces that still have this problem that I didn't touch because I expected this silly decision to be reverted within a week or two?

Silly stuff like this and failing to add new REAL enterprise level features for OnDemand has really tried my patience, to the point where I have a costed proposal up to the board to migrate to another system.

I'll reiterate too - CSS isn't an option - using Atlassian OnDemand.

Doesn't work for us - not a fix.

How dare you mark this as resolved? This is not a fix. It's not even as good as the workaround I've been using for the past year.

Sorry, but this is not a fix - this is a hack that I could do with any good paint editor.

Our association spends a lot of time developing a brand - as you have. They are very specific therefore on the look-n-feel of everything associated with that brand. Rounded logos are way offside.

+1 to reopen this issue, or at a minimum confirm the CSS to revert to square logos.

"I'll now be marking this issue as closed."

Congratulations, John! I'm sure it's a relief to finally put this issue behind you. Too bad so many of us don't feel that way.

I worked in a software development company several years ago where we were constantly dogged by customer complaints on one poorly designed product feature. No matter how many workarounds we presented – and trust me, we presented a boatload of workarounds – we kept hearing about the issue. Many influential people in the organization brushed off the complaints; they reasoned that it would require too much time and resources to re-engineer the code to address these customers, who they referred to as "the screamers." (Fixing the issue would also mean the company was admitting they made a mistake.) The leadership simply decided that the complaints would stop if the screamers just took the time to follow our workaround steps.

After a couple years of this, customer surveys (and the company's financials) clearly showed that our people were bolting to the competition, whose handling of the same functionality was more logical and easier for users to understand. The company is no longer in business.

I sent this email to acampbell@atlassian.com back in February.
You asked for people to contact you directly about the whole “round logos” issue. Here are my two cents worth.

Make the logo square. This isn’t additional functionality nor complexity. This is a reversion to the original functionality which decreases complexity since people aren’t required to write custom css for their square logos. I can make a circle logo that will fit in the square with minimal loss of size. It doesn’t work the other way.

Basically, a lot of logos are not just pictures. They contain information and rounding logos, even ones that are square, makes them lose information. With a mere 48X48 pixels, making a square logo fit into a circle, makes that logo only 78.5% of the actual size (100*100 vs. 50*50*pi). By requiring a circle, we have the option of losing over 20% of our actual logo or making it 20% smaller.

This isn’t a problem with a logo that has all the information in the middle of the logo, like the ones you show. It is a big problem with square logos that are not concentrated in the middle. Also, with our population getting older, we need bigger fonts and bigger logos.

Here is an example of a square logo. I can read the original. The “rounded” logo is missing letters. The 78.5% logo is too small to read. Rectangular logos are hit much worse with the whole rounding requirement.
<png snipped>

Here is the logo of a major code effort where I work. Getting it into the 48X48 size makes it barely recognizable while having it be 78.5% just to fit in the circle made it hilariously small. Cropping it to a circle is a non-starter.
<png snipped>

Ines
PS – We purchase this functionality from you to make our job easier, not to require us to code CSS. I also find it amusing that while the logo is required to be a circle, the space it takes on the screen is a square.

Two additional things to note. In your example showing the new upload tool, your “square” logo example is not a valid example.

Try that with a logo that has elements that go out to the corners of the square, then measure the pixel dimensions of your original square logo and compare that to the pixel dimensions of the resulting rounded logo.

Also, as others have already mentioned, this new upload tool doesn’t solve the problem we have with rounded logos. The very reason we find forced rounded corners unacceptable is because it leaves us with only two options for logos that don’t fit within these silly circles: 1) just ignore the suddenly chopped off corners that appeared when we “upgraded” to the version that introduced these forced rounded corners (not an option for me) or 2) shrink all affected logos down to fit within the circle, making many of them illegible because, in many cases, the logos have to be reduced nearly by 50% in order to fit inside these ridiculous circles.

Note that, while rounded logos are used by other sites for user avatar photos, where each user only needs to modify one logo in order to work when those sites switch from squares to circles, you have chosen to implement this “feature” in the worst place possible by applying it to an element for which dozens if not hundreds of instances exist on our systems which you are forcing your users to modify in order to fit in these circles…which I’m fairly certain none of us asked for.

They’re fine for user photos where I only have to change my photo, but maddeningly frustrating for space photos where we have to change dozens if not hundreds of them based on your one change.

Who here doesn’t have anything better to do with their time than re-sizing or re-uploading a bunch of logos so they can fit inside a circle and become barely legible?

Dear Atlassian,

The people posting here asking you to restore the ability to use a square logo without the corners being chopped off and without having to shrink it down to fit inside a circle we don’t want are your customers. While many of us may not be the ones signing the checks to you, we do work closely with the people who do and we are telling them how ridiculous you’ve been about truly resolving this issue which our users are complaining to US about.

Please give us the option to enable or disable rounded corners for space logos in our admin settings. Heck, you can even enable it by default if you like, just give your paying customers…the people who help keep your lights on and the people who recommend (or don’t recommend) you to other potential customers…the option to disable it instead of forcing rounded space logos on everyone.

I’m sure it looks beautiful in testing, but for those of us with dozens, if not hundreds of spaces in our production environments that are using logos designed to make full use of the square real estate provided in all previous versions, we just need a “rounded space logos” checkbox. That’s it. The new upload tool doesn’t solve anything for us as we still end up having to shrink our square logos down to nearly half the size in order to fit inside the circle.

our legal department requests everyone to NEVER mess around with our company logo.

Changing it from rectangle to square or to a circle IS among the forbidden activities.
I assume this is the same situation at many other companies.

+1 to all the comments above.
Atlassian is not authorized to change uploaded logos in any way !!! (besides of reducing the size, as long as the aspect ratio remains the same)

A simple reading of the title of this bug "Provide a way to avoid the automatic rounding of space logos" should indicate that it is neither "fixed" nor "resolved." Didn't you read any of the comments on this issue? Very disappointing.

Actually, after thinking a bit more about it - this feature doesn't add any value what so ever! This was almost as easy to do in Paint (or any image editing software), before uploading the logo to Confluence. So the solution you've given us is no improvement.

+1

I still vote for
1) This issue is not fixed
2) I still want rectangular space logos without any enforced rounding. At least as an option that works in OnDemand.

This fix does not solve the problem.
Missing feature is to let us choose or not to activate logo rouding during logo upload (maybe with a dedicated checkbox ?)
Some square entreprise logo need to stay square and use full logo placeholder !!

Are we on candid camera here? You are developing a feature that is irrelevant to the problem, in fact it would not have been needed if you didn't create the problem in the first place, and now you resolve this ticket? I find your approach very unprofessional and it shows no respect for your customers.
We don't want rounded logos. What part of that don't you understand? Nobody had a problem when they were rectangular.
Please reopen ticket. This is not over (resolved) yet.

So, you implemented the change - before talking to us? Again?

One question about the feature. If the Google example you've shown above, you resize it so that it fits within the rounded space logo. And you show it with a 410x488 image. But that is then further scaled down to 48x48 pixels, right? So many company logos will be not only scaled down to 48 pixels, it will have to be scaled down even further to fit within the rounding.

I still vote for
1) This issue is not fixed
2) I still want rectangular space logos without any enforced rounding. At least as an option that works in OnDemand.

We had an older version of Confluence. Our marketing team built some really cool Space logos for each department. When we upgraded to the latest Confluence, suddenly half our logos are no longer usable. Why is this not configurable? Seems absurd.

+1 to Phillip's comment. Bring back the ability to install any ratio/size of space logo.

Shane Day - pish. That's a mere year and a half, and they're actually doing something (not the right thing but hey, we're only customers).

Have a look at this one: CONF-5974

Can I also add, this has been an issue since FEBRUARY LAST YEAR!!!

@Aura - CSS isn't an option for OnDemand users.

This should be a no brainer. A circular logo fits inside a square layout with zero need to scale the image. A square logo on the other hand has to decide between allowing the corners to be cut off, or to scale down to almost half it's size to fit inside a circular layout. If there is a strong preference for the circle icons, then make a config option for whether to "circle-ize", "round corners" or "leave alone" the logo.

You can customize the logos with CSS customizations. Of course, this assumes that you (unlike me) want to write CSS. What I think we are discussing is a logo default. This whole thing started when the original square logo was replaced with a circle. If they hadn't changed out from a square, this ticket wouldn't have been created.

While I personally would love a configurable logo, a square logo (like before) is what I expect as the default. The point I was attempting to make is that they should be giving us a default logo that is not a circle and telling us what that default will be. Are they planning on changing to diamond-shaped logos? Are they going to dodecahedrons?

Given the pervasiveness of square avatars / profile photos elsewhere online these days, I would think most of us could live with our non 1:1 logos living inside a 1:1 image area. The rounded corners, on the other hand, are truly annoying when you do have a square or close to square logo or image and the only way to make sure users see the entire image is by scaling it down to where it’s barely legible so that it will fit within the boundaries of the circle that was just thrown over the wall at us a few versions back in place of our square and rectangular logos. This is particularly maddening precisely BECAUSE square avatar / profile photos are so common everywhere else, so many of us have logos designed to maximize use of the square image space most commonly provided.

Configurable Ratios = nice to have

Easily configurable / easy to disable rounded corners = must have

What if I have a logo that is 4x3? The point is that whatever solution Atlassian comes up with it needs to be configurable or at least flexible to allow for all shapes/size ratios we could throw at it.

I choose to believe that @john has read all our comments and taken them into consideration. I would be happier if he had said the following since we have a logo that has a 1x2 logo.

"Thanks... Based on your feedback we'll be changing from default of a round to a rectangular 1x tall by 2x wide logo. I'll update you again when we begin implementation."

"Based on your feedback we'll be making changes to how this is implemented. I'll update you again when we begin implementation.".

Thanks!
But I think you're missing one key aspect here. Talk to us before you start the implementation. That way we can come to a good solution that works well for us - instead of presenting us with how it was done - like you did last time...

+1 to Steve's comment.

(no "like" button anymore available?)

This continues to be a ridiculous issue to have to put up with and your message above that "We'd like to discuss this more" is quite frankly offensive as the clear weight of opinion from the sheer number of comments in various places about this issue is that round space logos don't work for anyone.

We have a mixture of spaces on the default and documentation themes and your bodge job of a CSS fix isn't practical as we have the global theme set to the confluence default. This means that we have to duplicate that CSS individually onto every individual documentation themed space, which is clearly very bad practice

My client is a venerable institution (150 years old) with a 'wordy' rectangular logo. Spaces have individual logos that include the institution name, plus another descriptive name. We now have more than 100 spaces that previously displayed properly. On the upgrade, the logos became squashed illegible circles. After applying the "fix" given above, they become squashed illegible squares. My client is not changing their logo to comply with Atlassian's poorly-conceived design decision.

Unlike the poor people who have opted for Ondemand, we can edit the CSS directly. Please provide a solution in the core stylesheets that allows space logos to be whatever size we want.

I don't like the round space logos either!

Thanks at least for sharing the CSS information.
Making them square is in most cases better than round.

I used the CEO contact form. I doubt a response will be given, but I hope I am wrong. I wonder if any of the UI design blogs would be interested in writing a piece concerning this and perhaps give their perspective on it?

Anyone here that happen to be the ISP of Atlassian? It would be fun to re-shape all images on web pages that they see to have rounded corners! Shouldn't be too hard to add that feature to some router on the way!
And we could call it a feature, and not a bug, since it's part of the ISP Design Guidelines.

Once upon a time in a past life ... there was a service provider that refused to acknowledge a bug in their software

By lucky chance, that same service provider used a service we had control over. One day, a special piece of code was added. "IF $CUSTOMER_NAME = 'blah' THEN ..." which introduced (only for that service provider) a nearly identical bug. When they complained, they received an anonymous note "That bug will only be fixed until you fix the XXXX-NNN" bug. That was priceless. And it worked too.

Is this a true story? You decide.

Unfortuantely Nasstiala have no respect for customer branding. I wonder how Nasstiala would feel if they were treated in the same way with their Irja and Fenculonce brands? I'm OnMadend!

I think sometimes large organisations develop dysfunctional thinking. The last example I saw here was https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AOD-6159 which did not get resolved until I emailed the CEOs. I'm hoping that Mike and Scott can see the stupidity going on here as well and you can all help by drawing their attention to it: https://www.atlassian.com/company/contact/contact-ceos

Why in the world won't you listen to your customers on this? Lose the rounding ASAP.

Ticket 32047 hilarious! My guess is that Atlassian leaves voting there as a placebo.

That's the top of this page.

I'm not sure they really pay much attention to votes, look at the comment here:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-32047

Got to this page and look at the top right hand side.
https://jira.atlassian.com/i#browse/CONF-28275

Aura: Can you please post on this thread a link to the improvement ticket so we may vote on it?

I had a conversation with a co-worker about this requested improvement a while back. His comment was that Atlassian perhaps wasn't moving forward with this because it didn't get enough votes so I went looking at recently resolved improvements. I only glanced at 100 improvements - and perhaps my sort algorithm wasn't all that good. That said, none of those resolved improvements had more than 6 votes. Most had zero.

Incidentally, it's almost up to the anniversary of this issue, and I can't say I'm terribly pleased with the original assumption or the communication since then. Although I believe there has been some improvements with the OnDemand offering over time, the "we know best" and restriction of features that would make life easier for administrators of usages in the enterprise continue to frustrate me.

SpongeBob Squarepants is about the only exception I could think of, and he doesn't work here, or for any of our clients.

If you insist on making things round, it would make more sense to make the user avatars round and keep the space icons square. Most people have faces that are at least mostly round. I know very few square-faced people. I do know a TON of companies and products with logos that do not work well when constrained to a circular portal through which to view them…at least not at the size of the components being discussed here.

This was a very short-sighted design decision. Please reverse it. And please do not spread it to your other platforms.

If there was a like button, I'd like Steve's comment.

Can I also add that the CSS workaround isn't appropriate for OnDemand customers? (Although I don't think it's appropriate for any customer, to be honest).

Thanks for the update Robert, but I have to say it's highly unsatisfactory as it clearly shows a complete lack of understanding of the overwhelmingly negative feedback you're getting about this design decision. I appreciate your request to talk more to help understand the problem and will be in touch directly, but there's really not a lot to understand. Confluence users and their customers have logos that have design guidelines and very few logos fit into a circle, so by enforcing this feature you're forcing users to break those design guidelines.

Your point that this feature is needed to ensure users can distinguish between containers and avatars is also very poor and would suggest to me that your vaunted ADG needs a rethink. The content of such images is likely to be very different and if a Confluence user believes that their users are likely to be confused between the two then they can easily resolve that by carefully choosing the content of the logos. The images are also used in different contexts and it's quite insulting to hear that you think your users need help distinguishing between them.

By promoting the CSS workaround for the problem you're clearly accepting that this is an issue for some users, but having this as the only solution instead of updating the ADG to come up with a better way of making the distinction or just putting in a basic configuration option is a very poor choice. Having to update and maintain a custom CSS for this, especially as it has to be applied separately to the widely used documentation theme, results in something that's far more complex than a basic option somewhere in the settings and creates an ongoing support burden for the system administrator or space admin.

The implication that you're going to propagate this decision to Jira project logos is also very concerning, as the problem will be even more noticeable for Jira users whose customer projects are accessed by the customers themselves.

I would strongly urge you to reconsider this design decision and listen to the overwhelming volume of negative feedback from your customers that you're getting.

"We want to talk to people directly to ask some more specific questions and understand the problem fully to come up with the ideal way of resolving this without adding additional complexity and in a way that we can maintain consistency across the product."

If we were to use Confluence to host a customer-facing Web site, our customers would not be not using YOUR product. They'd be using OUR product, which we would create and deliver using your tools.

You need to give us the tools to meet our requirements, one of which is branding the site with our rectangular logo.

I can't believe what I just read in above Atlassian's statement. There is no sense nor qualified reason detectable in such a decision. In my eyes, this is clearly a mislead, unnecessary and wrong decision. It annoys users with an unnecessary restriction for the idea of questionable designers to make logos round. If half of custom logos are square in your analysis, assumingly that means half of the Confluence user all along, how in the world can Atlassian decide to punish them with such a useless decision. There is no gain whatsoever in restricting logos to circles, it only annoys those using or even having to use square ones. An isn't it obvious that you can easily create a circle logo inside a rectangular frame, much easier than the other way around?

We are serving our customers with JIRA and Confluence. They have logos. We provide those as project and space logos as a courtesy to them. Most of them have strict CD rules and requirements for others using them. Can you imagine the trouble we get into with this. This Atlassian decision has no benefit at all. If we want circular logos we make them ourselves not because Atlassian forces us to.

Please review this questionable design decision. It serves none else but Atlassian and is a restriction that none needs and none benefits from. As a company serving so many Enterprise customers Atlassian should have a better sense about such a thing.

I clearly vote to take this back. Unfortunately there is no way to format my vote bold, heaviliy bold it would be.

@Daniel Batten: Hear, hear. When a company puts out a manifesto stating "WHY WE DON'T WANT TO JUST [do this simple thing]", all I can think about as a customer is, it's not about what Atlassian wants, it's about what the clients want. I am reminded of frustrating meetings with UX designers who are heavily influenced by the Apple "we know best" mantra. Talk about alienating customers over petty crap. Geez.

We just upgraded from 4.3 to 5.3 and I just spent time fiddling with the distorted logos, which was not really fun.
The CSS helps but why can't we just decide how we want our logos displayed. It seems like a waste of time.

I've got my rectangular logo back, but Confluence is putting an error message in the theme header:

<div id="theme-header">
<p>.theme-documentation .space-logo .logo </p>
<div class="error"><span class="error">Unknown macro:

</span> </div>
</div>

As a mere user of Confluence, I don't have any interest in writing or implementing CSS simply to get my square logos. My job is working for my company, not writing code to make Confluence do what it should be doing in the first place. Having Confluence mangle our logo is off-putting. Hopefully this will be rethought and it won't go into the JIRA product.

The story of making space logos round to differentiate them from avatars rings false. Are there that many avatars that are similar to space logos? And if you really want to differentiate them, why not make the avatars round?

They explained "why" at the top of this page: "As you use different products, it's easy to spot a 'container' element like a space."

The question is why they think Confluence users are all seeing spaces as "container" elements within a suite of Atlassian products.

I echo Antonio Rodriguez's comments above. I don't see how it adds complexity to have a check box to allow the logo in its default state, rather than applying a rounding effect that is not changeable without adding code to the sheets. I am comfortable doing this, but the question is "why"? I'm an end user, and I should not have to jump through hoops to get something to look the way I want it. Especially since in almost every other instance of a product with avatars, if you upload a logo, it displays as you expect.

It is a small problem, yes. But something that people see immediately.

I'm late to this discussion, but my art guy directed me to this thread and I implemented the CSS fix and voila, we can happily use our logos again! I just don't see how it is too inconvenient to add a simple option to tick a checkbox on whether we want circular logos or not or heck, let the customer choose to upload a logo that's in the shape of a circle or rectangle or a square depending on what they want. I'm somewhat surprised that migrating from our old ver 3.x to a 5.2.3 Confluence installation has introduced us to so many unusual issues that don't really hinder use but just make the whole experience more uncomfortable than it needs to be. The rounded logos were a low level annoyance; the loss of Wiki markup has been very frustrating (yes, Wiki markup serves as a shortcut but it sure doesn't work as expected when building tables - it used to be so easy to create them with the Wiki markup in the past compared to the new editor).

I've just gone through this tail-wagging-the-dog experience, a few things that helped me...

• Our logos are rectangular. I ended up dropping the logos into a square frame. this avoided the distortion (i.e. they stopped being stretched), but because the logos are ultimately designed to be rectangular, they end up looking too small. But at least they don't look daft.
• I found that setting the new default logo had a weird effect, whereby all of the spaces inherited a low-resolution version of it. Manually setting the space logo for each space to this new logo fixed it. Not sure why... I'd moved on by this point!
• the CSS above helped. I had trouble working out where to apply it initially - not sure if this is specific to our instance, but I could only get to the "Space specific stuff" via permissions. The URL structure is something like $HOME/spaces/spaceadmin.action?key=$SPACENAME e.g.
  https://mysite:8443/spaces/spaceadmin.action?key=MYSPACE
• Hope that helps someone else bang their head for a shorter time than I did.

I guess that depends on how much functionality actually gets merged.

"Atlassian announced they are deprecating the documentation theme"

They're planning to merge it with the default theme. To me that seems like not so much deprecating it as making it the default.

@Robert Lauriston: I think I may have steered you wrong... I believe this only works on the default theme. I remember when we ran into the problem, we ended up converting all our spaces to the default theme. I ended up doing them all by hand, over a weekend. VERY annoying.

Having said that - after the annoyance faded, I was glad I did it. The new sidebar shortcuts in the default theme give space owners a nice way to control how the information is displayed. It was painful, but well worth the effort. Especially since Atlassian announced they are deprecating the documentation theme:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/2012/12/17/Advance+warning+of+plans+to+merge+Documentation+theme+with+the+default+theme

I added the following to the space stylesheet but it's still not fixed. I'm using the Documentation theme, do I have to put something in its configuration?

/* Default sidebar */
.acs-side-bar-space-info .avatar-img-container .avatar-img-wrapper,#image-holder .small-logo-container .small-logo-wrapper

/* Space directory, Dashboard space list */
.global.logo, .space.logo

/* Doc Theme header */
.theme-documentation .space-logo .logo

/* Project dialog */
.project-dialog-header-wrapper .project-header img

@Robert Lauriston. I'm guessing you're running into the same problem we had... The instructions work as written. HOWEVER, if you already have customizations at the space level, then the global doesn't apply. Either ditch your customization, or edit the space style sheet too.

This is ridiculous. Who has a round logo? Not Atlassian. Not my company.

I followed the instructions for the workaround and the logo's still round.

It's ridiculous to force accept your changes !!!
Please, give back old logo style !

I do not like this change and I agree with Daniel above : I am too stupid to understand why you would not just create a round logo instead of doing this ? Clearly if a space logo is for example "IBM" it would look ridiculous and be an instant show stopper for a Confluence space implementation.

Forcing groups in my company to redesign their logos to fit into a round container instead of a square makes admins like me wonder what other limitations you are going to put on our ability to provide our site a confluence instance. I don't want to require yet more customization to make the change from our current systems to confluence.

I don't understand that. If you (Atlassian) want to use round logos, why don't you just design round logos and use those instead of doing it with CSS?

While this is being sorted out, is there a nice Atlassian branding consistant 48x48px "home" icon that could be used as an alternative to the Confluence logo? (Using the Confluence logo is confusing in a space context, as it links to the space home, not the Confluence home).

I couldn't find anything in this set https://developer.atlassian.com/design/iconography.html

Maybe Atlassian could come up with a set of space icons, which represent common space scenarios - clients, projects, library, archive, documentation, etc?

Yes, a doc theme change would be sufficient for my site. But it also relates to Atlassian direction for JIRA for instance. Same icons are used there for projects. I hope there is an option when JIRA tries to switch over to round.

bob.swift@charter.net won't be any change by the end of the month sorry.

One interesting thing the survey results showed up was that a lot of people who were having problems are using the doc theme, seems it correlates tightly with an externally used instance, where this is a bigger issue. So we might make some tweaks to the doc theme to remove the rounding, then look at what to do for the long term.

I don't understand why it is so hard for you guys to release a patch update for Confluence and resolve this once and for all.

Not very impressed.

John, can you provide an update to the survey info and whether something can be expected anytime in the next month or so (for OnDemand)? Otherwise I need to get rounded graphics designed and rolled out.

Thanks for those who have responded and given feedback directly already.

For anyone else who is interested in this issue (including everyone that has commented to date), completing this short survey will greatly assist in planning the best resolution for this. Should only take a few minutes - https://atlassian.wufoo.com/forms/confluence-space-logo-usage/

Hi All,

Thanks for the continued feedback.

I've sent emails to most people on the thread directly but for anyone I missed or future commenters, we'd really appreciate talking to you directly about this issue in some more detail, so please email me: jmasson at atlassian dot com and we can setup some time to discuss.

We'd like to address the problem but there's obviously more to it than making the circle a square in a lot of cases so we want to make sure we have a good understanding of different peoples needs and then we can look at how to make that work in all the places a Space Logo appears.

Thanks,
John

I had a helpful chat with Bill Arconati yesterday at the Roadshow (and thanks, Bill for being so gracious esp. given my history of bad-tempered comments). I showed him a graphic example of what happens to a text-based logo when it's converted to 48x48 pixels, so maybe the design team might have a rethink about it.

Funny how we are all voting on something that can't even be voted on!

Kathleen, I hope that you continue to press your points to Atlassian and not give up just yet . Wiki Plugin for Confluence can help mitigate some of the wiki issues and I trust more of the editor issues will eventually be solved. And we are all still hoping that they will reconsider this item .

I echo the +1 for a vote, although as time goes on, it's becoming more and more unlikely that I will continue to work with Confluence.

Why?

• lack of usable & friendly 'source' editor (never mind the loss of wiki markup - even Sharepoint lets you edit the html on a page)
• 200+ bugs in the 4x editor but clearly a lot of time and effort spent on "improving" the interface instead
• arrogant decisions like this one that get steamrollered over faithful, long-term users. My current clients have been using Confluence since 2006, but there's no way we can move from 3.x to 5 without spending a LOT of money & time to migrate the data, update the macros etc. And way too often it seems like change just for the sake of change.

+1 to the vote. (Not sure why we are still discussing this - it is obvious that an error was made with this "feature" and the ability to display logo as previous need to be re-introduced)

+1 to the Vote.

Why is this issue still closed? You are not allowing your clients to vote on this issue. Based on the number of comments, this is obviously important to a lot of your clients.

+1 to respect the original logo files uploaded. Fine to have an option to make them circular, controlled by space admins.

Our situation is the same as the one described by Steve Randerson above.

Why should Atlassian design guidelines be imposed on other corporate logos which have been commissioned at great expense. Marketing types can get very touchy over this sort of thing, and will question why we're using a tool which imposes it's own will in this way.

I'd like to place another vote for removing the restriction that means space logos have to be circles. We have a confluence space for each of our customers' systems and put their logo as the space log on their space. None of our customers have circular logos. That means they all now look silly with the corners cropped off.

I could go back through every space and upload a new version of each image with a big space around the edge that would allow me to fit it into the circle, but that would just result in tiny logos in the middle of the circle.

I don't think it's Atlassian's place to dictate what shape logos we should have. If you desperately want us to use circles then make it a default crop pattern, but please allow it to be removed and proper rectangular images use.

I agree with everyone here that the rounded logos are frustrating. They are a perhaps intelligent design decision for Atalassian's line of products (i.e. your own internal branding), and maybe they even show us a best practice for how to distinguish "container" elements. (But do they really? Is this something you tested? Do users constantly have trouble identifying the "container" elements and complain about always clicking on, say, user avatars by accident and then slapping their foreheads? This sounds to me like a solution in search of a problem.)

However, Atlassian has the convenience of already having image-based logos, which not all companies have. Those with text-only logos, like my company, will almost surely have a rectangular logo if the company name is longer than a few characters. And we're not talking small potatoes companies. Just to stick with the B's, look at Bloomingdale's, Bloomberg, Bain Capital, Bon Appetite, and BRIDES Magazine. Their true logos are all text-based and will be too small to read if smushed into a tiny circle. I suppose they could simply import their favicon icons into the space logo, though all are variants on the letter B and therefore difficult to distinguish out of context. If they wanted to really make their logo pop out in your restricted space... well, I guess they'd have to design something new and rebrand to meet Atlassian's personal design decision.

To sum, I hear you saying that your internal branding decision, which might be visually interesting and MIGHT contribute marginally to usability, should inspire us all to hire graphic designers and get new logos out there. Or change our Confluence site logos, which would possibly work most of the time except, in my example, if you're BRIDES or Bon Appetite and both owned by a parent company (Conde Nast), who might want the Conde Nast logo as the site logo, with BRIDES and Bon Appetite having their own spaces. Now the well-intentioned circle-logo change is shown to be as limiting as we all say it is, and it's difficult to distinguish which space is which simply from the space logo, especially because we had to shrink the B so that the extender and lower serif don't get cut off by the curve.

To address points John has made in the comments:
1. You say that you KNEW this decision would negatively affect half of your customers (and the good half would, in your own words, "suffer"). That's just staggering to me. I can't imagine any other company seeing that statistic and still choosing to move forward.
2. You say there are too many options in Confluence. This suggests to me that Atlassian is bleeding customers, all of whom are flocking to a much simpler product. Or perhaps the customers call in to your help desk while struggling to find an option--and then once they find it, they say, "I looked really hard for a way to do x, but now that I've found it, I just wish I didn't have the option to do it. If only there were fewer ways to customize this product." These things seem unlikely to me, but I'd love to hear your perspective on why you feel there are so many options that you need to limit our ability to brand our sites correctly.
2b. For what it's worth, the "value" a company gets from the "cost of added complexity" is retaining their branding, which is not exactly a small thing, and certainly not something that only a Space Admin would care about, especially if the company is using Confluence for an external-facing document.
3. You mention the default theme will soon become the only theme. However, there's been a LOT of feedback on that change about losing the page tree feature, as you even mention. If Atlassian ends up keeping the page tree, I assume you'll have more area for the space logo, meaning that it could be slightly more rectangular than you currently allow. And, as one commenter elsewhere said, why not switch to a square logo ONLY when the sidebar is collapsed? Then Bloomingdale's could have their full name when looking at the page tree (please keep the page tree!) and display only the B when collapsed. Voila.

Thank you for the transparent comments about your decision making process, even though I find your conclusions to be flabbergasting. I hope you'll continue to reconsider this decision as you move forward.

I need to express that Atlassian surprises me more and more often. And not always in the good way. I appreciate the effort to make your product better, good looking etc. But why don't you leave an option to stick to older look? I've just upgraded Confluence and I hate the rounded space logos - not all images look nice when cropped or resized as stated by others.
Why are you making me to update all space style sheets or all space logos? I'm using the Doc theme and it seem to me, that I have to update spaces one by one. Is that true?
Argument of confluence is overconfigured in not valid to me, it rather appears that the new look is a fancy half-baked product. For sake of backward compatibility you should leave GLOBAL option how to disable logo rounding. Please do not make similar steps in future.

A few comments:

On of the great things about Confluence has been the ability to customize, tweak, and in some cases bend it into whatever you wanted it to be. It seems that each updates takes away a bit more of that once great flexibility.

Also, I'm concerned that you are making design decisions based on only on analysis of the OnDemand users. My feeling is these users would be less likely to do extensive customization and push the limits of Confluence. They likely have less technical and/or professional resources - that's why they choose that service.

Personally I'd prefer to allow my company and users to come up with our own design guidelines, not have these dictated by some committee at Atlassian. This could have easily been addressed by "recommended" themes, rather than be enforced by the system. (i.e. the carrot verse the stick approach).

Also, no, Mr. Masson, I don't think most of your users would say you already have too many options. You have many, and that's one thing we love about Confluence, but not too many.

I love Confluence despite this frankly silly design decision, it is truly an amazing piece of software.

For those who aren't aware, as was mentioned above, you can customise the global header to replace the Confluence logo with your own, which gives another (and broader) way to put your branding on Confluence. Details of how to do this are here.

Unfortunately this does not solve the problem. The global header logo dimensions do not allow for much besides a word/abbreviation/small company name. The space logos need to allow for more than round logos. If a user wants a round logo, they can use photoshop to create a round logo.

Thanks for the continued feedback on this issue everyone.

For those who aren't aware, as was mentioned above, you can customise the global header to replace the Confluence logo with your own, which gives another (and broader) way to put your branding on Confluence. Details of how to do this are here.

If anyone would like to have a 30 minute chat about this problem directly to make sure we understand all of the details please email me : jmasson at atlassian dot com and we can setup a call.

Well, that gives me yet another reason to NOT upgrade from 3.5. My client has 250+ spaces. I've spent a fair amount of time and effort creating logos for spaces to distinguish them and make them a bit more attractive. Many of them are WORDS, not icons, and sometimes fairly long words like eCommerce. Are they going to be unreadable if we upgrade?

Bah. Why don't you spend time & effort on things that people actually want and ask for?

I have to add my comments here as well.

We use a confluence space (one of many use cases) for documenting a version of a product that we manufacture.

We have registered trademarks that we use as the space logo.

Cutting the corners off means that our trademarks are no longer displayed correctly. Note this is not our company logo, this is our trademark for our product.

From what I understand now, I have the following options:

• Gain legal advice as to whether our use of the altered trademark falls within the guidelines of the registration; or
• Resize all the images to actually fit inside the circle, which we don't know how large it is, so the trademark is displayed correctly.

I'm a little confused, especially that this was essentially rolled out with little notice, how a design decision on your behalf could potentially end up with me needing to get legal advice from trademark layers.

If anything, if you NEEDED to make a differentiation between user avatars and space logos, wouldn't you change the user avatars? The user avatars are a whim of the particular user, and can be changed at any time by the user if they don't like how it looks. The space logos are far more official from the owner of the space, and are far more likely to be registered trademarks.

Please reconsider opening this or enabling some sort of option. Personally, I wouldn't give two seconds thought to dropping user avatars, from my perspective they're entirely useless.

Is it possible that, even with one space, the company logo can be (or is) displayed via the global logo?

Also, I think folks shouldn't use company logos for spaces

We don't. We have like 40 spaces, one of which is available to all our customers. The logo for that public space was the logo of our product that we sell (and provide support for in Confluence).

Regarding printing:
We've found that looks much better to print Confluence pages to a PDF writer than to actually use the Confluence export to PDF functionality. So, it won't help us at all to have another logo for the printing (since we don't use the Confluence printing options. Also, we don't want that logo at the space, since that logo is not the logo of our product.

An yes, OnDemand let's us define a global logo for Confluence.

I think folks shouldn't use company logos for spaces; rather, use something related to the space.

I think you are missing the use case where a company might only have one space, which could be public facing documentation for a product. In this instance a company logo or even just some type of branding related to the company/product is often used.

Note that when printing the image is not rounded. Also, I think folks shouldn't use company logos for spaces; rather, use something related to the space. The global logo in the top left of the screen (the part that is always on the screen) doesn't have this restriction (does OnDemand let you define a global logo?). It might be a better option to include the global logo in printing since it seems Atlassian has bigger reasons for the rounding. If someone wants to put in an RFE for that, I'd be happy to vote for it.

This is a really bad idea imo. We're using Confluence to (among other things) write public documentation. When we print them we do want a proper logo showing our official company logo.
Does anyone think that we will change company logo based on a cloud tool? No, I don't think so...

To add to the bizarre nature of this, the 'hot-zone' for the image is actually a square! When approached from the diagonal the little 'i' appears when the mouse is still 10 pixels away from the actual image. So why not just use square icons and those who want round images inside can do so and have transparent borders. Then you don't need multiple versions of the CSS or any switches! Simple.

So Atlassian provides one and only one place in the OnDemand version of Confluence where we can display our own corporate or product branding but then tells us it has to be circular because that's their branding choice? The 48x48 sizing can be justified but there is no justification for enforcing the circular requirement. One extra config option is surely worth it to allow Atlassian's customers to present their own branding choice to their own customers.

I also understand not adding too many options, however, breaking compatibility is also something to be avoided and most customers would consider this of up most importance. I would encourage Atlassian to consider the importance of upward compatibility to customers when making design decisions. Often that means adding an option to provide backward compatibility or at least a suitable migration period. This is true even if you want change the default behavior. Furthermore, communicating breaking compatibility changes early should be done. Especially with OnDemand where there is no choice - the site is upgraded and breakage occurs overnight. I can't imagine round logos was a last minute decision.

Just to amplify Ben's comments, I too understand the "Confluence already has too many options". I even strongly agree - Even aside from user experience issues, more options means more test cases and a greatly increased likelihood of bugs. My complaint is with the default assumption that users want a rounded icon. It seems more reasonable to default to square images so that users get what they expect, and allow the css customization to make it rounded.

On a side note, my tech writer (who is very skilled with CSS), has not be successful in applying the changes you recommend. He claims everything he is doing in the global and space style sheets is being overriden by the spacesidebar.css. Have you guys actually tested removing the rounding to make sure your procedure works?

As you use different products, it's easy to spot a 'container' element like a space. By having an easily identifiable Space logo design, which is different to people's avatars, when you see them somewhere, you understand straight away what you're looking at.

If this is the case why not leave it up to the user to upload uniform space logos on their own? It's great you are trying to automate things but how hard is it for someone to create a circle logo if they want one? If they want round logos to make them easier to spot as 'container' elements then let them create their round logo and upload it like normal, but don't automatically force all logos round. Also, I do not see how it would be easy to confuse a space logo versus an avatar? Most avatars are a profile picture of someone's face. A logo is usually a icon/art of some sort.

Correct, so if you slightly enlarge the canvas your logo is on and you'll be able to select the entire thing to fit inside the circle.

This is again more of a hack and would ultimately make most logos look bad as we are essentially just making them smaller.

I guess I am a bit disappointed how this was handled. I understand you have your reasons but the strict manner in which round logos is enforced is concerning. Combined with the only solutions offered is to hack our images to make them smaller to fit inside of the circle of death. It seems the onDemand users were not really considered as far as these changes go. I would even be fine with a strict 48x48 limit but the whole circle thing has left me confused even after your lengthy explanation above (thanks for those details though).

Also I am a bit disappointed to see this issue closed before it even had a chance to gain votes from your clients. Do you not have a status that is similar to "Closed" that still allows votes? Something like "Pending Close".

Earlier you also mentioned "Confluence already has too many options". Please re-consider that statement as far as onDemand users go as options are all we have to live by as far as customization goes

We don't have a rectangular logo, it is square where parts of the logo extend near the corners. Your example above only works because all of your logo is focused near the middle of the square image area. This does not work when you have a logo that extends further to the corners.

Correct, so if you slightly enlarge the canvas your logo is on and you'll be able to select the entire thing to fit inside the circle. We could look at allowing you to zoom out beyond the size of the image but unless it has a transparent background the end result isn't going to be that good. Something we may look at in the future.

Yes, there's a lot of work that will be done to include the functionality from the doc theme (most notably the full page tree) into the default before we merge them. Thanks for adding your feedback!