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What would a Drupal themer want to say to a web designer

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I’ve been leading Drupal web projects for some years now and yet have never heard a frontend developer say: “This design is meant for Drupal. It is so easy to implement it, the designer totally gets how Drupal works. I’m totally having coffee with this guy later today, we’re pals.” Instead, it’s often about how the designers only goal in life must be to think of ways how to drive the devs into insanity and ultimate extinction. What seems to be the problem?

Where to start from, would the themer say, putting down his half-smoked pipe and jQuery cheatsheet. Lets start from the beginning. The moment when you see Dropbox icon in update mode, and with a shaky cursor, open the design folder for the very first time. What will it be, Photoshop, Fireworks, or God save us all, an Illustrator file? Or is it just a bunch of .jpg’s with no means to separate backgrounds from text and shadows?

Whatever it is, the themer is usually left to discover his own way around the new landscape. Because the designer is off to a vacation, or too busy with his next project, or generally not involved, because his job is done, right? And it’s easy to understand that he is fed up with it. Because, yet again, the client puts him into a position where he not only has to make it look pretty, but also work out the UX process and half of the functionality while at it.

And grid. The grid is those cyan lines that help you align stuff in Photoshop. And Omega is a watch company. Keep the number of columns consistent through different responsive states, you say? Your stupid math has no place in my creative process, I say!

Finally you get throught the main laoyouts and move on to theme more specific functionality. The comment thread. The pager. The inputs. Is there design for those? No. And when you ask for it, the designer frustratedly spends his Saturday evening catching up and creates a pixel perfect design, that has no common ground with Drupal’s default layouts whatsoever, requiring thousands of characters of JS to make it work.

Lets breathe in

Its fun to rant, but all jokes aside, there’s some pretty simple stuff that would save a ton of time and money for everyone:

  • make nice layered source files, where all elements can be extracted separately. Please don’t send .jpg’s.
  • a Drupal project should be a team effort from the start. There is no independent graphic design phase. It does not make sense that the web designer is also the one who single handedly draws up the layouts and UX.
  • use consistent grid when doing responsive layouts.
  • when drawing up standard Drupal elements, look at the examples, get a basic knowledge of how the code works. Features are cheap, details expensive.
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