JOSH HIGGINS

Josh is a creative leader and multi-channel storyteller with 20+ years of global experience building brands and teams.

Josh is the VP, of global creative for Atlassian leading a multi-disciplined team of Creative, Brand, Design, Ops and Production teams who work across all customer touch points.

Prior to joining Atlassian, Josh was Global Chief Creative Officer for Reality Labs at Meta, where he built an organization of 200+ creatives that included designers, creative directors, brand & experience designers, creative technologists, producers, program managers, and business affairs people. Josh and his team led the go-to-market charge and marketing for Meta’s Quest, Ray Ban/Meta Smart glasses, and Portal products guiding every facet of naming, branding, packaging, experiential, retail, performance marketing, ad campaign development, implementation, and evaluation.

Before Josh took the helm at Meta’s Reality Labs, he helped co-build “The Factory” team. A wildly different type of in-house agency. A place that nurtured creativity on a scale never before seen. The Factory and Josh were tasked with some transformational initiatives, including the redesign of Facebook’s logo, brand, and product identities. the globally patented personalized platform video program, Facebook brand campaigns, websites, print collateral, product marketing creative for all verticals of Facebook and online / offline creative for Facebook's annual F8 conferences. Oh, and BTW while all this was going on, Josh helmed the Analog Research Lab and the Facebook Artist in Residence program. 

Josh’s arrival at Meta came on the heels of a successful re-election campaign for our 44th POTUS. In 2011 he joined Obama’s team as Design Director. Under his guidance, team Obama rewrote the rules of campaign branding, marketing and outreach. He and the team played a pivotal role in melding digital and analog creative with analytics that resulted in phenomenal results and hug from Obama himself when it was all said and done. 

The term “renaissance man” is tired, but accurate in this case. Before Josh ever moved a pixel or chose a typeface, he was a bass player. As a Fender Instruments endorsed artist he spent over a decade recording and performing with his band, fluf. A band that’s been described as “Punk” by some, and one that was featured on the first five “Vans Warped Tours”. fluf also shared the stage on tours with Fugazi, Jawbreaker, Rancid, and Sublime among others. After 7 albums for both Cargo and MCA Universal Records, Josh went back to school, earned his design credentials and the rest is a history that’s still being written. 

Even with all his professional success and acclaim, Josh has never lost sense of who he is, or where he came from. He has and continues to make giving back a priority in his life. He serves on the Tony Hawk Foundation Advisory Board and dedicates a percentage of his time to various social causes including founding and organizing The Hurricane, So-Cal Fire, and Haiti Poster Projects in addition to lecture series with photographers, designers, and filmmakers with proceeds donated to charitable organizations and causes. Josh is also an in-demand speaker and has inspired audiences here and abroad with his wisdom, chill demeanor, and humble awesomeness. 

Humility is at the core of who Josh is, so even though he has picked up several over his career, he’d be the last person on earth to talk about awards.

- Penned by his good friend Robert