HipChat was a team messaging and collaboration service launched in 2010 and acquired by Atlassian in 2012 [1]. The product was discontinued in 2018 after Slack acquired its intellectual property [2]. Its visual identity is remembered primarily for a chat-bubble icon that drew public attention in 2012 for its resemblance to Apple’s Messages app icon.
Design and History
HipChat’s icon consisted of two speech bubbles, a common visual metaphor for chat applications. In February 2012, when Apple unveiled the icon for its OS X Mountain Lion Messages app, observers noted that it looked like a reversed version of the HipChat icon [3]. HipChat co-founder and CEO Pete Curley, who also served as a designer for the company, acknowledged the similarity in a blog post, writing that he did not believe Apple copied the design but that one of the two companies would likely need to change its icon because of user confusion [4]. Curley also noted that HipChat’s icon had itself drawn comparisons to Apple’s earlier iChat logo [4].
In May 2014, Atlassian introduced a new HipChat logo alongside the release of one-to-one video calling and screen sharing. The Atlassian blog described the update as a “cute new logo” that fit well within the Atlassian family, and noted that HipChat would be integrated into the Atlassian ecosystem over the following year [5]. The Japanese-language version of the post is a translation of the original English blog entry published May 6, 2014 [5].
Later in 2014, HipChat for Mac 3.0 received a broader design overhaul aligned with the Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG), a set of published best practices for designing Atlassian products [6]. The update also introduced redesigned status icons, replacing the previous red, orange, and green circular indicators with new shapes that were easier to distinguish, including for color-blind users [6].
Meaning and Symbolism
The speech-bubble motif in the HipChat icon directly referenced the product’s function as a chat and messaging service. The 2014 redesign was positioned as making the logo more fitting for the Atlassian product family as HipChat moved toward deeper integration with Atlassian’s ecosystem [5]. No official documentation of additional symbolic meaning for the icon has been published.
Typography and Design
Atlassian’s design system later included dedicated HipChat logo assets, including an icon, logo, and wordmark, exported through the @atlaskit/logo package [7]. These assets were deprecated in 2022 after the product had been discontinued [7]. The wordmark was not intended to appear on its own under Atlassian brand guidelines, though it was supported for legacy navigation contexts [8].
Logo Index is an independent educational archive covering logos, visual identities and graphic design history. All trademarks and brand assets remain the property of their respective owners.
