I actually started my site / blog AFTER we announced the existence of & plan for Acquia. So I don’t have a post here regarding that.
But it seems wrong for NOTHING to be here about it, since it was so important.
So I dated / published this post around the date of that announcement, show it shows up in the blog post list on the appropriate dateline. I’ve then continued to add content to this page, even though that information emerged subsequent to the original post date.
Though I didn’t capture the announcement in my own blog post, fortunately my co-founder Dries Buytaert was an active blogger then, and has a series of posts you can read on his site about a couple of key events:
- Announcement of the company. It existed prior to that, but we were staying stealthy until we had something meaningful to say. We were prematurely “outed” by a press person who discovered us and said he was writing whether we had announced or not. So, we scrambled, built a company website in about 2 hours, and announced ourselves there, and on Dries’ blog.
- Announcement of the closing our Series A financing. We did not go the now-more-common route of raising a Seed Round. In 2007, it was more common to just start with a Series A from VCs, which is what we did.
- Our first hires from the Drupal community. By this time, we also had Jeff Whatcott on board as VP of Marketing, but since he wasn’t known to the community, Dries didn’t want to write much about it, lest the community fear that the project was going to be turned into a commercial disaster. (Here was the post where we talked about Jeff.)
- Launch party. We had worked behind the scenes to get Drupalcon to be in Boston in early 2008 (which turned out to be not long after our “announcement”). So we used that as a way to build trust with the community by throwing a nice launch party at a (now-defunct club) called Felt, where the entire 2nd floor was festooned with pool/billiards tables. We had spotlight gobos made that shone the Drupalcon logo onto the tables. I was the DJ on the main floor.
This (my) blog then picks up with my post about my “Modest Pride” for having done a good job helping facilitate Drupalcon along with the Drupal Association – though my blog is still less about Acquia and more about technology company building in general. (In contrast, Dries blogs much more regularly than me, and has a summary page showing all his posts about Acquia from inception to current-day.)
Fun fact: The Acquia logo is different in 2024 than it was originally. Here’s the original, several interim, and the current new logo.
The original one had both a separate “drop” graphic and the name. It was also all lower case, which I was partial to.
Our branding team wanted integrate the drop a bit more gracefully into the text making up the company name. This was the next iteration.
It also turns out that gradients are difficult things in logos. It makes it more complicated for things like a cutout / stencil, where you can’t actually show a gradient.
So the next step was to kill the gradient, and switch using an initial cap, along with a custom modified version of an off-the-shelf font. The team also embedded the drop inside the Q of the text for the name, and then we put all that inside a larger drop.
We did this to pay homage to the Druplicon, which has been popular in – and done a variety of ways by – the Drupal community.
However, the larger drop wasn’t really needed, so we dropped that as part of the official company logo, and just stuck with the stylized text for the name. This became the final version, and it has stuck (edit: still the same in 2024).
However, as of 2024 we still use variations of the drop for associating various products with the company’s overall branding, such as these (see Acquia’s product page for distinctions).
For the record, I still have an affinity for the drop in the original logo, so I’ve made a flag for my flagpole at home with that drop on it. Nobody knows what it’s for – and the company is unlikely to complain – since I committed the company name.
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