Athletics updates Salesforce’s brand to mark its move into agentic AI — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

As the world’s leading customer relationship management platform, Salesforce will be a household name for many of us. It was founded by Marc Benioff in 1999 on the idea that enterprise software could be delivered through the cloud, which at the time, was far from the norm. The company’s move into agentic AI, with its Agentforce platform, saw Salesforce turn to New York-based studio Athletics for a timely evolution of its brand, including the research, creative strategy, identity, art direction, brand voice and motion graphics.

The identity revolves around a concept Athletics labelled the ‘Atmosphere of Possibility’ – depth and three-dimensional space put to work on the 360-degree experience of the agentic platform, where data, agents and humans come together. The system’s shapes come back to the circle at the heart of the original Salesforce cloud mark. “Round forms carry approachability across the whole brand, all the way down into the typography,” explains Creative Director Daniel Irizarry. “But the circle is the grammar, not the idea. The system is rooted in the space beyond the cloud where Salesforce clients transform their businesses on the platform. Geometry gives us the form. The atmosphere concept gives us meaning.”

A suite of core shapes came out of the circle, from 360-degree panoramas to framing devices, which Athletics tested across marketing collateral to check whether the system holds together and if a piece is functional or expressive. The palette starts from Cloud Blue – the colour Salesforce is already known for – brightened to be digital-first and extended into a set of teal, yellow, pink and violet. Alongside it sits a 3D icon system that moves outward from the Salesforce product suite – with each icon drawn to represent a customer’s challenge, ambition or win.

The typography was inherited and deliberately left alone. A customised cut of the geometric sans Avant Garde, alongside a custom typeface called Salesforce Sans. “These letterforms are already generous and round, and there was more range in them than the system had asked for yet,” Irizarry notes. “So we put them to work with more scale, more contrast and more dimension, using type as a graphic element in its own right.”

Astro, the character that has guided customers through the Salesforce brand ecosystem for years, used to appear everywhere but now appears selectively in the moments when trust matters the most. “Astro stands for something true about Salesforce, a company that has always been fun, human and approachable in a category that often isn’t,” Irizarry continues. “Pulling back on the character meant that warmth had to live somewhere else, and we had to prove the system could deliver it on its own. That is a lot of what the Atmosphere concept, brighter palette, 3D iconography and illustration system are doing.” The corporate brand now has two characters – Astro for Salesforce itself and Agent Astro for the Agentforce platform.

“A lot of the evolution work was subtraction,” Irizarry explains. “We simplified the existing Salesforce brand and re-established the core identity elements, which meant defining the absolute minimum a piece needs to still be unmistakably Salesforce. That floor is what makes volume control possible.” At the quiet end of that range, customer success leads the way through messaging and photography. Dialled all the way up at an event, that same brand is packed with typography, bold colour, 3D iconography and illustration.

The depth and dimension of ‘The Atmosphere of Possibility’ extend to the product’s user interface. “It’s there to tell a story, so we treated it as an opportunity. We simplify key moments of the product experience, keeping them recognisable as real moments inside the platform while using them to say something at the brand level about Salesforce,” Irizarry tells us. “When the job is to explain how a feature works, we go to specific product screens and demos, which is where that detail belongs and where it performs best. Marketing UI earns its place by giving you a feel for how the product works. Product UI shows you.”

With teams all over the world making Salesforce brand and marketing material, scale was a design requirement from the start. As a result, Athletics worked directly with Salesforce’s internal brand team on the guidelines and assets underneath the system. “Every decision came back to one question: will this hold up in the hands of someone who wasn’t in the room when we built it?” Irizarry explains. The guidelines prioritise actionable examples over aspirational ones, with a gallery of existing and evolved work that a designer anywhere can pick up and use the same day. The internal brand team then built ‘Brand Central’ in Webflow, where the global team gets the toolkit guidelines, best practices and asset downloads. “The real measure of a system is what other people can make with it,” Irizarry concludes.