Drupalcon summary: Designing for Drupal

Now that we've finished our session (thanks to everyone for the great feedback!), I get to go to sessions.  I'm going to do my best to post summaries of the sessions I visit.

The first of these is "Designing for Drupal," presented by Chris Fassnacht and Stephanie Pakrul, themers for CivicActions.com.  As Drupal reaches wider adoption, it is becoming more important to effectively bring together the functionality and structure developers create with the creativity and “wow” factor designers specialize in.  This session focused on the themer’s need to balance these two different perspectives and sets of priorities, along with techniques designers can employ to more effectively work on Drupal projects.

The biggest tool they focused on is no surprise: communication.  By communicating the way Drupal works, and the tradeoffs that certain design approaches may require due to Drupal or CSS behaviors, the themer can help clients and designers to know what to expect.  Raising these points early on can reduce the need to renegotiate design aspects after the fact, and provide designers with a better knowledge of how their design will ultimately be used.  Clients can more easily weigh the benefits of certain design features against the costs of actually producing them, before any decisions are made.

Some tips and techniques they suggested for themers and designers:

• find the ‘Drupal flow’ and work with it, not against it
• get ‘Drupalness’ in early in the design process
• speak up when a design element is difficult to implement...there may be an alternative that works for everyone
• design pieces for general use cases, not specific
• design for change
• look for high-impact, low-effort design opportunities like forms, typography, menus, and headers

Finally, they offered some resources for web design patterns:

• http://www.welie.com/patterns
• http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns
• http://www.designinginterfaces.com
• http://ui-patterns.com

Parting words...designers can help to make Drupal seem more design-friendly by getting involved in the community.  Offer module developers feedback and suggestions for their interfaces, and help create a bigger design-oriented part of the Drupal community by sharing your knowledge of Drupal and the opportunities with others.

Comments

[Rostyslav]

With it's 6th version, Drupal was unveiled with some very welcoming improvements in usability, and if you ask me.. it's about time! As a new Drupal user ( after all, I've known about Drupal for only a year.. ) I would have to say that the usability done in Drupal 5 was only fulfilling the minimum requirements that were needed.

[Martin Welch]

It's my first time to drop by your website. I'm interested to learn on how to use Drupal and reading through your blog, I got lots of useful information about Drupal. Thanks a lot! ;)

Hi Martin - Glad you enjoyed it! I've been picking up new Drupal info here and there, and should have another Drupal-focusd post up soon.

Drupal is pretty cool...keep exploring!

[SozlesmeliOgretmen]

It's my first reading your blog.But it's great.Thanks for this really useful blog.