History of the Druplicon, the famous Drupal symbol

Does everybody know a story how the Drupal was created? It's quite interesting.

Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder were students at the University of Antwerp back in 2000. Back then a broadband internet connection was a luxury, so Hans and Dries set up a wireless bridge among the student dorms to share Hans’s ADSL modem connection among eight students. Dries made an online forum, where they shared news like where they were meeting, having dinner, etc. This software was nameless for a while. Then Dries graduated and left the dorm. They wanted to stay in touch so the internal site had to go online.

Dries came up with a name Dorp, witch in Dutch means “village” and he liked that. When looking for a domain Dorp.org, he mistyped as Drop.org. Mistakes are often good, so the name stayed. In 2001 Dries decided to release the software behind Drop.org, which he named Drupal.

Once Drupal was initially developed, a logo needed to be created and the concept would have to include a drop, of course - the same theme that inspired the software name.

In today’s article, we will see how Druplicon was changing trough years.

May 2000

First commit of drop.org logo in Jeroen theme. The logo was created by Dries’ nephew, whom he shared the dorm with, Jeroen Bensch. Jeroen used Gimp, drawing all the details pixel by pixel.

Sep 2000

Drop.org logo in Marvin’s theme. Dries’ comment: "Updated and renamed my two themes: I removed redundant boxes and tried to work towards simplicity."

Mar 2001

At the beginning of the year, Drupal 1.0.0 was released. 3D drop (most likely) by Steven Witters aka. UnConeD makes its way into the logo in March. After the logo was created Drupal 2.0.0 was released.

Sep 2001

First sighting of Druplicon in Drupal CVS in Marvin theme, upgrading a typeface. The idea of Kristjan Jansen aka “Kika” was to put two drops sideways together to form an infinity symbol. When placed inside a filled circle, it resembled a face. After more work by Steven Wittens, aka. “UnCodeD”, the Druplicon was created: a stylised drop with the "infinity" eyes, a round nose and a mischievous smile.

Nov 2001

Another version of Druplicon was added to Trillian theme.

Dec 2001

Commit of giant misc/druplicon.png. This month drupal.org was getting separated from drop.org, some content migrated and first project issue created by ax.

Jun 2002

Drop.org logo was excluded in the themes and replaced with the Drupal logo. This is the point where Drupal finally got a life of his own. Note that Druplicon got some finer gradients by Steven aka. UnConeD but basic shape was still the same.

Jun 2003

That year Drupal 4.1.0 was released. They were spicing up the Drupal logo of Marvin and UnConeD, both made by Kristjan Jansen. Later that year Drupal 4.2.0. and 4.3.0. were released.

Jun 2004

Drupal 4.4.0 and a little later 4.5.0. were released. Michael Angeles aka. jibbajabba, famous UX guy created several designs for Drupal t-shirts for a LinuxTag conference.

T-shirts

Logo

3D Druplicon as we know it now was created by UnConeD/Steven.

May 2005

In 2015, Drupal 4.6.0. was released. The logo had its “crystal” look, based on 2D or “Cell” Druplicon.

Dec 2007

Drupal 5.0. was released. "3D Druplicon" is introduced to Drupal core themes by kkaefer. He update Bluemarine, Chameleon and Marvin themes with the current 3D Druplicon.