Designing for Drupal

SESSION OVERVIEW
Realizing a design in Drupal can be a daunting task for everyone involved. This session will examine how different members of the site production process (designers, developers, and themers) approach the task of creating and implementing a design for a Drupal site and why this can lead to difficulties. However, we will also explore some approaches and tools that can help get everyone on the same page and ease the transition from design to realization. While this will be a lecture style presentation with real-life examples, questions and discussion are encouraged.

TRACK
Design & User Experience

AGENDA
Designing for Drupal

Understanding Designing for Drupal
1. The different mindsets of designers, themers, and developers
2. What is “Drupal-friendly” design (and is Drupal “design-friendly”)?
3. Communication: from Designer/Client vision to Developer reality to Themer compromise

Approaches to Designing for Drupal
4. Finding the Drupal flow and working with it, rather than against it
5. Robust vs brittle design approaches
- Designing for the general case rather than the specific case
- Designing for content changes, layout changes, and functionality changes
6. Balancing standardization and innovation

Tools for Designing for Drupal
7. Design patterns and repeatable elements
8. Style guides
9. Visualizing your design as Drupal

GOALS
The goal here is to learn how designers, developers, and themers see the design task and then look at some shared approaches they can use to transform a design into a successful site.

AUDIENCE
This session is directed toward designers looking to create original designs for Drupal, developers who create sites based on the work of designers, and themers who are tasked with creating themes based on the work of designers and developers.

RESOURCES
This session should be accessible for almost anyone interested in web design using Drupal. However, a basic understanding of XHTML/CSS and Drupal would certainly help to get the most from this session.