Today Grapefruit turned 10.

Ten years ago, me, Marius Ursache and Stefan Călin Liuțe joined forces and cre­ated Grapefruit (back then called ‘Grapefruit Design’). We were the first in Romania to tell and do many things about cor­por­ate and brand iden­tity, nam­ing, brand manu­als and web sites.

We were ter­rible stub­born in everything, par­tic­u­larly I was ter­rible stub­born about my tech­no­lo­gical choices — we were also among the first cre­at­ive agen­cies in Romania to work with Java Ser­vlets and XSLT and avoided as much as pos­sible CGI, PHP and ASP which were pop­u­lar among the other web agen­cies. Hav­ing already sev­eral years of Java exper­i­ence and espe­cially know­ing XSLT were instru­mental in work­ing with Con­nex (now Voda­fone Romania), with Hewlett-​Packard Romania for the first Romanian mobile portal, and for many other projects.

Look­ing back, there were count­less of pro­jects, each of them with their inter­est­ing story, with the end­less argu­ments with cli­ents’ IT depart­ments and with fel­low col­leagues on why Java, why XSLT, why Doc­Book, etc. — I knew that it wasn’t tech­no­logy for technology’s sake, but I real­ise now what it was: the quest for a com­fort­able level of abstraction…