Design

A Bulletproof Approach to Theming

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Theming is not rocket science, but it can be difficult being a themer on Drupal projects that are larger in scale. Often you find yourself being pulled into projects at an especially unfortunate moment, or maybe you’re the lucky one that gets included from the start, but without a clear overview as to what the IA, design or basic functionality looks like.

Intended audience

This session is intended for front-end developers and designers or project managers looking for better ways to utilize a themer. Those unfamiliar with Drupal, will gain an insight into the workflow required to create a strong theme, and ultimately an entire website.

Questions answered by this session

How to design and build a theme that works with Drupal and not against it.

How to identify and use the basics within a design, minimizing the need for constant design iterations.

How to use HTML5 and CSS3 to your advantage.

How to use a themer more efficiently.

How to start designing in the browser and use your skill set more efficiently.

The Prairie Initiative - Redesigning the Social Spaces of Drupal.org

Presented by

Since the Prairie Initiative was kicked off at the Chicago Drupalcon earlier this year, a small but active group have been working on achieving our goals of:

  1. Improving the collaboration tools on Drupal.org so that we can do more and better work together and make Drupal better, faster.
  2. Growing the pool of contributors by making Drupal.org a better and easier place to become a contributor - to make it less intimidating to people who want to get started contributing.

Intended audience

Anyone who contributes to Drupal today or who is interested in contributing in the future.

Questions answered by this session

What is the Prairie Initiative and what are you trying to achieve?

What are you working on?

What parts of Drupal.org are you touching?

What is Social Architecture?

How can I get involved?

Web Typography & Drupal: Putting Arial Out To Pasture

Presented by

Arial's days are numbered, and we should all celebrate. Come learn about the evolution of web font embedding, how it works, what it can do for your site and your users, and how to make the most of the biggest advance in design for the web since the deprecation of the blink tag.

Intended audience

Designers, design directors and front-end developers - we'll cover why we should use web fonts and how to make it easy to incorporate in our workflow

Questions answered by this session

Why should I use font embedding?

Where does it work (or not) and on what?

How do I do this in Drupal? (To module or not to module)

I'm a developer - how do I make this not kill my page load time?

Should I host or use a service for embedding?

Don't Design Websites. Design Web SYSTEMS!

Update 2011-08-25: Slides can be downloaded here. Due to file size restrictions, we had to remove many of the image-heavy slides. You can download and view the full slide deck on SlideShare.

Intended audience

This session is intended for anyone who has had to create or implement sitemaps, wireframes, and mockups. Those unfamiliar with Drupal will learn what Drupal "wants" to do and will be able to more easily prepare these materials, and those who already work with Drupal will learn tips and tools for managing the expectations of clients whose designs haven't been optimized for Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

What should a designer know about a project before architecting a site or creating its look and feel?

Why are sitemaps, wireframes, process flow diagrams, and mockups important, and what are they supposed to communicate?

What happens when you're given a design that wasn't created with Drupal in mind?

What are the challenges a design firm faces when they aren't the ones implementing their design?

What tools and techniques can be used to accelerate the design process in Drupal?

Design in the Open: Collaboration Models in Open Source Design

Presented by

This session discusses the contribution designers are making in the open source world and how they are doing this - and how Drupal can learn from this and adopt a better collaboration model for designers and developers.

I will examine a number of highly successful open source design projects, extract the essential points out these projects and then look at how Drupal might be able to use similar tools and ideas to fuel designer participation in the Drupal project.

Intended audience

Designers, developers, themers

Questions answered by this session

How do designers collaborate in other Open Source projects?

What motivates designers to contribute to Open Source projects?

What can we learn from other successul design projects?

What can we do to increase designer participation in Drupal?

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