Drupal 9 is going to be the easiest upgrade in Drupal's history. With the release of Drupal 9, the project has proven its vision of transforming the development process with an emphasis on continuous innovation and a regular update cycle. Over the course of Drupal 8's lifecycle, we've seen this new strategy come to fruition with six-month minor releases including major feature improvements. With Drupal 9's release, we prove that major version upgrades are easier than ever before.
For the last 5 years, Drupal 8 has used its own dedicated drop logo, and as the release comes closer and closer, it's only become more important that we update the brand to help unify Drupal's identity across the ecosystem.
With Drupal 9's release less than 30 days away, we're confident that we've achieved the easy upgrade goal, and we are doubling down on that success with the new Drupal brand.
The new brand represents the fluidity and modularity of Drupal, and our community value of coming together to create a greater whole. The new logo can be used by itself, or alongside the Drupal wordmark.
This new design was chosen for its ability to represent Drupal not just at a single moment in time (for a single major release), but onward into the future. We expect to continue using this new iteration of the Drupal drop for the Drupal 9 lifecycle, through Drupal 10, and beyond.
While this continuity is the central element of this new design, there is sometimes a need to represent a specific version of Drupal. That could be for celebrating a particular release, or highlighting new features in a minor version. For that reason, the new Drupal drop may also be used with a version number at its side.
How did we arrive at this new design?
Late last year the Drupal Association put together a request for proposals for design firms to help us develop the evergreen brand for Drupal. All of the responses we received were excellent, reflecting the incredible passion and pride in their work of the design firms that work in the Drupal space. Ultimately, we selected SixEleven who had previously helped us design the brand for DrupalCon.
We brought together a team of people to navigate this process. Dries Buytaert as project founder was joined by Drupal Association staff members Heather Rocker, Carrie Lacina, and myself, board members Audra Martin-Merrick and Suzanne Dergacheva, and longtime community leaders Angie Byron and Gábor Hojtsy.
SixEleven provided a series of initial design concepts which were reviewed by this team, each providing a different take on the classic Drupal brand. How would we emphasize human contribution? Drupal's evolutionary path? Continual innovation and growth?
Eventually we realized that we'd addressed these questions before. When working on the DrupalCon brand several years earlier we created an inner drop that represented all of these ideas, while still remaining classically and recognizably Drupal.
As many design undertakes often do, our vision suddenly came together - each drop falling into place to create the new brand.
Brand Consistency
When the inner drop design from the DrupalCon brand became a front-runner for the Drupal brand itself, we realized there was an important opportunity to create consistency across all of the Drupal brands.
As such, we've updated the Drupal Association brand as well, to use the new inner drop surrounded by our simple blue circle, representing all of the ways that the Association surrounds and supports the Drupal project. The DrupalCon brand will continue to use the drop on a colorful field of triangles, representing the diverse voices and communities we bring together with the event.
What about the Druplicon?
The beloved community mascot hasn't gone anywhere. The new branding simply replaces the Drupal 8-specific logo that was in use for the past 5 years during Drupal 8's life cycle; it does not replace the Druplicon. The Druplicon still exists as an emblem of the Drupal Community and a mascot to be remixed and reused by local community organizations, as it has been throughout Drupal's history.
Here are just a few examples from https://www.druplicon.org/
Spreading the word
In the coming weeks, we'll be updating materials across Drupal.org to reflect the updated brand. We encourage you to update your own materials using the resources and brand guidelines we have made available.
We'd like to see all of the organizations that provide Drupal services, or that create software that integrates with Drupal, adopting the new brand in their own materials as well. Consistent use of the Drupal brand across the ecosystem helps us achieve the goal of creating more market recognition of the brand. Together we can spread the message of what Drupal has become.