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.
Today Grapefruit turned 7.
Seven years ago, we left Necomm and Monitorul (both part of NordEst Media, at that time), because we felt we could do better. And we did.
Five months ago I left Grapefruit, again because I felt I could do better.
The issues have been the same both times: work place inertia, mental inertia (read: they couldn’t undergo a paradigm shift); it was more or less about semantics: in the first case it started with implied vocabulary semantics over common grammar and
syntax (read: XML and web standards), in the second with explicit semantics and open world assumption (read: semantic web).
In the past years, Grapefruit shifted its focus from interactive media to branding, and by including the interaction design in the branding process, it succeeded to oversee the social aspect of the web and frequently limit the interaction just to presentational aspects.
Although I believe that this change was market driven, Grapefruit reached a point where it became uninteresting from my point of view.
And here I am, pursuing my dreams, as a research student at Knowledge Media Institute (The Open University), where I work in both NeOn and Open Knowledge projects.
I have been quite preoccupied lately… so I haven’t posted in a while; I might be adding a few backposts starting with this one.
Well, I was one month offline (checking mail in an internet café does not count, E-mail is asynchronous); before that month a lot of things happen at lightning speed, chronologically ordered: leaving Grapefruit, finishing my masters degree (Computational Linguistics, at the Faculty of Computer Science, “A.I.Cuza” University of Iasi), and then a one-month holiday which was split between two locations, Crete and Transylvania.