No grids, no glory

Visual identity

Overview

In July of 2025, a surprise brief at Atlassian brought together a small team to develop and pitch an internal global initiative. Freedom to think outside the brand was key to the pitch's success. Some sensitive details about the project have been omitted due to the project's internal nature.

My responsibilities

I was brought into the project to develop a versatile pattern system that was both part of the initiative's branding, as well as a potential activation feature allowing the generation of virtually infinite unique patterns for various use cases. Examples include generated in-office signage, posters, and screen printing activations.

The project was lead by Megan Rowe, under the guidance of Corey Scott, and included motion designer Melli Lawrence, copywriter Melanie Duong, and producer Melinda Michaud.

This was a fun one. The brief was simple and I was given free reign to explore and experiment with repeating patterns. Understanding that the initiative would likely support user-generated patterns, I approached the problem of pattern generation from both an aesthetic and logical perspective.

As a basis for the system, I was inspired by Brad Frost's Atomic Design which you can see below. By mixing and matching atomic elements into molecules, organisms, and so on, then folding and mirroring the designs, not unlike origami, complex and interesting patterns can develop. From there, it's just a lot of fun arranging elements and seeing what sort of patterns develop.

A generative pattern system inspired by atomic design

Megan Rowe, the project lead and Melli Lawrence, the motion designer, took the new patterns and built out an amazing variety of in-office digital signage, posters, print designs, activations and swag.

Integration into the many use cases of the initiative