K15t's Scroll PDF Exporter has a feature that lets me work around the issue for PDFs. I presume Scroll HTML Exporter will do the same for web help.

https://www.k15t.com/display/PDF/Uploading+Resources

Still looks terrible in Confluence itself, but unless Atlassian changes the licensing we're never going to use it as a web server for customer-facing docs anyway.

Why is this marked "resolved"? Our new logo is rectangular and it looks terrible in my PDF output. I tried the "quadratic" plug-in but it doesn't seem to help.

No Problem. It is just that "Sandler" is not a nice thing to say here in Bavaria - you could loosely translate it to "hobo".

I do beg your pardon, Mr Sander. I hate it when people change the way I spell MY name, I should be more careful.

Come to think of it, I hate it when people change my company logo, too.

kathleen I am not a Sandler.

Thank you @Martin Sandler. But, sadly, it still doesn't fix rectangular logos that are crushed into oblivion.

So well over 2 years since the insanity began, it's well and truly been forgotten. Martin, it's awesome that a third party has released a tiny-plug in for something that should never have been done to the main product in the first place. Those of us on OnDemand, we can just continue to suffer.... or migrate.

For those not on ondemand, you can just install this tiny plugin: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.tngtech.confluence.plugins.quadratic-icons

Nicklas, I suspect a large proportion of the 84% is also dissatisfied with the solution. The 16% is only the ones that didn't care that the logo is now round.

Wow! So 16% isn't happy at all! 16% of 40,000 companies. That's a whooping 6,400 companies, each with hundreds of employees. Dissatisfied.

Kathleen, didn't you read the official response? 84% of people would be happy with an editor to make square/rectangular logos fit within an unusable resolution with an uploader.

Happy birthday, unresolved issue. The space logos are still round, they still look stupidly squashed, people are still cross about it.

Well done, Atlassian. No wait, it IS resolved? I'm confused ... if it's resolved, why are the logos still round?

Chris, I actually tried to alert Atlassian's CEOs about this issue and several other, and outlined how this enterprise can no longer bet the future of their business on Atlassian's products. No response. Although it would have been comical if I'd got something back telling me to use CSS hacks.

If I were the CEO of Atlassian and I stumbled upon this “issue” and the way it has been handled thus far, I would not be happy.

I guess it’s a good thing for certain Atlassian personnel that I’m not the CEO of Atlassian.

But let's face it - this company have changed, and they will continue to change - and they will leave customer behind.

Very true, in fact they have left customers behind already. My disappointment is very real as well. Instead of addressing outstanding bug reports and feature requests they waste time on round logos, that are reducing a perfectly good feature. They introduce it without asking and are not willing to take it back even tho the community is massively complaining. What may come next is another bold price increase because of this great new feature - or even worse, it will be sold separately as a mandatory plugin for the same price as Confluence itself.

Atlassian, what are you doing? Please get real again and care for your customers.

why

Workaround

For a workaround involving CSS (as well as background on why rounded logos were introduced), please see this comment.

?

Simply bring back the old code and dump everything about round logos. Is it so hard to understand?

This has to be the most ridiculous issue ever. Can you guys stop wasting mine and the other customers freakin' time and just fix the freakin' thing?

And NO CSS IS NOT A FREAKIN' WORK AROUND FOR ONDEMAND CUSTOMERS.

Seriously, this is so embarrassing.

So a rectangular logo will be reduced to tiny size in a circle. That's still not professional-looking and it breaks a lot of companies' logo standards.

I think we should appreciate the open discussion with Atlassian - but IMHO I don't think that they will change their mind again.

From their point of view they did already a change: they provided an option to increase the size of the logo - even if it's still rounded. And they try to fix it in a more general way: CONF-35037

No, I'm not related to Atlassian - and I deeply convinced that the cost-benefit ratio are not well studied so far because customers are not expecting a rocket science modification (restore existing behavior) - and most of us are very annoyed about the current situation (check comments).

But let's face it - this company have changed, and they will continue to change - and they will leave customer behind.

That's why I try to focus on a compromise / workaround which is IMHO feasible for Atlassian because it's respects their self-conception for design and still leaves an options for their customers - and we can not wait until CONF-35037 is implemented.

That's why I'm looking for your feedback for a specific idea - please comment on CONF-35127.

@Shane @Aura - fair points.

I also am seeing in this discussion a mixture of concerns/expectations between features and platforms (server vs cloud), and consequently audiences too. The matrix indeed has different needs/requirements sometimes.

I would agree that when a change is technically feasible and logical, and also not grossly service affecting (which the logo seems like it would not be, on face value), indeed the PMs should listen, or make the feature optionalized.

I guess we will see ... if they listen, act, or stonewall.

Ah! JIRA Studio - well that makes sense. It was more closely based on the Server version imo.

Have you ever used Quicken cloud and the desktop version? The cloud/SaaS version is scaled back, and imho, some of of that scaling-back is simply a NO GO. I switched back to desktop version.

I mention this just an example; most SaaS products have to take a step back (i.e., be a little less rich) from the server versions/features; this is common. They simply cannot technically be the same on everything, at least out the gate. But they provide other convenience - hosting and no self-managed upgrades. It's a trade-off.

I do not know if your other concerns are related or if the Server version would be better for you - but my guess is maybe. Happy to help you get hosted on a "like"-onDemand experience (no self-maintenance), but with the richer Confluence server version... or even to just answer questions to help (but it still does not solve the logo issue for now).

I do not wish to digress this thread off-topic anymore. ellen@appfusions.com if you wish to discuss.

I don't believe I am taking cheap shots. I see a vendor that isn't hearing the basic issue. This is very similar to my experiences with another vendor. They had a good product that combined a wiki, a tracker, and a version control system. The system was good 4 years ago. Unfortunately, that vendor made design decisions that negatively affected our ability to do development. Because of those design decisons, we moved off of that system onto the Atlassian suite. This is what I see happening with the Atlassian tool suite now.

It is not that the circle logo is "a bit bothersome" that is the issue. The issue is that the decision is being defended and that the people setting the ticket to resolved appear to be either unwilling or unable to understand the issue. I have to agree with @shane that things change too often with a tool. Base functionality should be more stable after 7 years of development.

That said, I hope that the core Atlassian developers figure out what their target audience is and make sure that audience is happy. I don't want to have to move to another tool suite in 4 years.

Incidentally, the stability concerns are Atlassian's, not mine, I'm paying for a service with SLAs from OnDemand.

If they are listening, I'm not seeing any evidence of it in any place. I have a number of vital issues that I watch, such as improved user administration on OnDemand, search that actually works to the same level as it used to on JIRA Studio, this stupid round logo thing, the list goes on. Most of these issues are things that have regressed over the years, and actually doing something about them would bring Confluence back to where it was.

@Shane and others..

I agree that the circle logo thing is a bit bothersome. Twitter figured out the balance on that issue - I think Atlassian can. Hopefully they will hear and listen to some of these comments.

On the rest, I feel moved to defend since Confluence Wiki has come a long long LONG way since my first experiences in 2007 - and as a vendor that also works on add-ons - a lot of them - there is also massive amounts of stability that has come to the platform, despite the complexity. Compared with so many other collaboration platforms, Confluence is pretty damn good.

There's so much you can do with core features, add-ons, integrations - but yes, like many tools, there is a learning curve, and takes time to change the tide in a large organization of users.

In short - technology is hard; users are harder. Things evolve. It is a journey, not a destination..

Cheap shots on the logo thing, sure. I understand your frustrations (also the branding arguments), as many others have also voiced - and I am sure Atlassian is listening too.

But I don't think the whole platform deserves the slams.

I'd say I think Atlassian lost the plot on this, but then I think they lost the plot a few years ago. For a so-called Enterprise Wiki, there sure are a lot of crappy things one has to teach users, most of my user base have just given up on using any of their products, because THINGS CHANGE TOO OFTEN and the convoluted things they had to learn to do things previous change to NEW convoluted things.

This insane circle logo thing for spaces is just icing on the cake.

You have an enterprise wiki, that people can't search, is difficult to administer, has regression issues with things like Office integration... but you know, it has ROUND logos, so everything is okay. That'll attract the shiny new things brigade as customers.

I find it amusing (in a gallows humour kind of way) that avatars can be square while logos are circles (not just round, but actual circles!). After all, we all know so many people with square faces...

Just to be clear - this is not a request to make avatars circular. I use the edges of the square to make my avatar unique!

Agreed. It's not clear whether John Masson actually understands the problem.

It's also a mystery as to why Atlassian would focus on workarounds for something so simple.

I heartily agree with your statement John, that "The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed." Given that you say this, why are you limiting space logos to 78% of their size? By making the width of the logo be X - and the height be X - and then requiring it to be round, you are making 22% of the space the logo occupies on the sidebar completely inaccessible. Your comment that most logos are rectangulare doesn't make the circle requirement any smarter. Remove the circle! Make it a square that occupies the same size as the circle. People like me with rectangular logos can fit our logos much more easily into a square than a circle.

This makes me question other design decisions on the part of Atlassian. If they can't understand the core issue on something as simple as the space taken by a circle vs. a square, what else are they doing that shows such a complete lack of understanding of this issue?

John, thank you for your comment - you wrote:

The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed. The new space directory and a number of drop downs which use the space avatar all have a restriction on how wide any logo can be, whether round or square.

Confluence provides themes - and this might by true for the new default theme, but this does not apply to the documentation theme

The documentation theme have no logo on the sidebar, only on the page - therefore enough space to keep the existing logo style.

Please re-enable the feature at least for the documentation theme until there is a solution in e.g. 12-18 month (until CONF-35037 job is done).

CONF-35037 might be a good idea for some people (not really for me, as of today),
but I don't see how this addresses the issue of changing rectangle logos to round logos.
For example, in the space listings, 35037 will not bring back the old functionality.
As Steve commented, our need is NOT to place huge images into the side bar. It may be small, but it may not be round. And it may not be a sqare, many logos are rectangles.
I do understand that there are limitations about the size of a logo. That's common practice elsewhere, too. I do not understand (nor accept) limitations to its outline.

Thanks for the response John, but as George says you still haven't done anything to solve this problem. We don't want to change the size of the logo - just to stop it being round. There's therefore no reason why the constraints should have any impact on this issue.

Of course your ideas for wider branding capability are welcomed, but that's likely to be months, if not years, away and that doesn't resolve our immediate problem of being stuck with the idiotic rounded logos.

Please Atlassian, just swallow your pride on this one, listen to your customers and allow us to have square or rectangular space logos. This is such a trivial issue for you to solve, but would clearly do a lot to appease some very annoyed customers.

If this wasn't such a serious topic I could actually enjoy the entertaining factor of it more. So, another month went by, probably used to work on the comment that has just been posted by John Masson. My opinion: John, whatever you say, however you say it, we want the corners of the space logo back! We do not want it to be wider, we do not want it to be higher. Your sizing constraints are not touched. You are simply erasing the corners of the logo with not even replacing it with something. It is wasted space! None of what you said so far is an acceptable argument. You may still call this "answered", true, but understand that nobody accepts the answer.

Branding the space like you suggest in CONF-35037 is a great idea. I will comment there for ideas I have on that one. It has nothing to do with this issue tho!

Hi All,

Firstly, let me say I appreciate the continued feedback on this and the passion shown for Confluence. Even if it's not exactly the kind we enjoy hearing it's always clear people are only upset because they love using Confluence. Secondly, apologies for the slow response to those who have replied since I closed the ticket.

I did make a mistake when I closed this - one on calling it "fixed", rather than "closed" or "won't fix" which I'll rectify, and for not doing what I was originally planning to - share our internal thinking on this topic. I'm always hesitant to talk about "vapour ware", i.e.: things that are not firmly scheduled on the roadmap, but this is one case where it would be more helpful than not.

I know there's been some discussion on round versus square logos, and what makes more sense for people / spaces, and to be honest, I hold no great opinion on that, the reality is what matters is that space avatars can no longer be unconstrained. This isn't an abstract design decision, but a core constraint now. The sidebar has limited width, especially when collapsed. The new space directory and a number of drop downs which use the space avatar all have a restriction on how wide any logo can be, whether round or square.

Which gets to the core of the problem. As am notes, this is most problematic for those with external customers of their own, where the space avatar is being used for branding. While it was never great in the first place, it's clear the changes mean the space avatar is now a terrible solution for branding a space.

So, we want to fix the core issue - give people the ability to quickly brand a space to make it distinctive. I've created a new ticket - CONF-35037 - with one early design we created of how this could look and work. It gives you a much bigger canvas to use for branding, that would cope with any logo and more. We would love to get your feedback on whether this would assist.

As I mentioned, we don't yet have a timeline for this work, it's just some very early thinking on how we could possibly solve this, but I think it's a good starting point for a discussion on meeting the needs of people on this ticket, so I'd very much appreciate you taking a look and giving us your early feedback.

Regards,
John

Just to ensure that Atlassian hear our voices: please vote here

CONF-34676 - "Provide a way to keep rectangular Space Logos in Confluence 5 especially in case of migration from Confluence 4".

Notes from the field: we are running one Confluence instance just to share it with our customers. Each space contains the customer logo according to their CI. I think you know the rest of the story ...

We just (yesterday, Saturday) upgraded from Confluence 4 to Confluence 5 ... and finally ?

marketing horror nightmare !#%!%$&$ - all the customer logos are now broken -

... and we have no option to rollback this change without killing other important project timelines. Our fault because we did no "visual" review during our testing? Probably. But after all the technical tests we never thought that this could happen ..

I'm sure you were very surprised about the reactions to your first logo decision - and now you came up with a solution which might comply to to your internal rules but does not meet the exceptions of your customers.

Actually all the votes should be multiplied with the amount of the customers of your customers - have you noticed that most of the drastic comments are related to the relation of your customer to their (internal, but mostly) external customers?

Your decision do have a significant impact on the relationship of your customers to their customer.

And the demand of rolling back this decision is not related to an attitude of defiance like " I'm as a customer want this feature back because I'm used to it for many years now " .....

Atlassian, I strongly recommend that you should re-think which "battlefield" you choose to fight with your existing customer base ... and if it's a really good idea start a debate on principles like e.g. "software development", "design" and "unnecessary features" to justify your decisions ...

I would like to emphasize and insist that this issue is reopened.
This issue is not resolved as you can clearly read in all comments.
I must say that I am disappointed about the ignorance and disrespect towards the user community here.

Attention **John Masson**

Please:

• Reopen this issue.
• Change your software so that it doesn't do anything to your customer's space logos. Just display them as is.
• Update the Atlassian Design Guidelines document so that this problem eventually gets fixed across all Atlassian products.

Why can't it be that simple? Do you have some artsy UI designer trying to bend the world to their will?

Agreed! We finally got Marketing to make us some cool animated Gifs for our spaces, and now half of them are unusable! Atlassian, why create additional work for your customers? Why waste our resources?

Steve - Exactly.

Why can't they just allow any kind of logo and not try to crop / warp / distort / disfigure / munge / mangle / blur / bend / twist / slant / garble / color / disfigure / defame / denigrate / impune upon its integrity? Isn't that the simplest solution and the easiest to implement? Why even do anything to the logos? Why are you doing this, Atlassian? WHY?

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.

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.

I am a seasoned Confluence user, and my position gives me the opportunity to act as an evangelist for Atlassian products (an opportunity I willingly and frequently take). However, I'm having a hard time defending Atlassian's decision to not provide an easy way to "un-round" space logos. Reading the rationale above, I am struck by the notion that Atlassian is doing a little too much navel gazing here. As a technical writer, I understand the urge to keep things as consistent as possible across product lines. However, after jumping through unnecessary logo hoops and reading myriad complaints from fellow users here, I can't help but think that the round-logo initiative is intended to satisfy Atlassian's interface designers instead of their customers. I seriously hope you reconsider this decision.

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