Making Drupal Dance: Techniques for Beautiful, Core-worthy Designs

For too long the Drupal community has lamented the lack of high-quality themes that are freely available. But the solution to this problem is much simpler than we’ve ever thought. We need learn how to communicate with the Design community and make Drupal dance!

[ Edit: Given the state of the miscommunication between Designers and Developers just before Drupalcon Paris, I’ve re-written the first half of my presentation to talk about the improperly-named “Designer vs. Developer” problem. ]

Agenda #1: Designer and Developer Communication

• The false “Designer vs. Developer” divide.
• It’s a phase.
• Haven’t we seen this before? New community member experiences
• Bad assumptions
• Solutions

Agenda #2: Collaboration Techniques for Core Themes

• Understanding what Designers want
• Finding a partner
• Looking suave even though you’ve never done this before
• Communicating your desires
• The back and forth of the design review tango
• Dealing with missed cues and mis-steps
• Taking the lead
• After the dance

With these collaboration techniques, Drupal will be able to achieve new levels of quality in both core and contrib themes. It will be a Drupal Dance Party!

Slides, Handouts, and a Correction

In one of my slides, I mis-attributed a very insightful quote to webchick. In fact it was Bojhan Somers who said it in his Reflections on a D7UX Project blog post. This has been corrected in the slides available below.

Slides are available on SlideShare.

A PDF of the Zen Reference card for 6.x-2.x (which I didn’t talk about, but everyone kept asking for) is available on Palantir’s website. :-)