design

Currently I am experimenting with something I dubbed 'Design modules', and I would like to contribute this idea back to the community and bounce off some ideas. Please feel free to give constructive feedback on this, and whether I am heading in the right direction. This is not to be considered a definitive write up by any means, but just one designer's journey in getting to learn how to design in Drupal, and where needed improve this process.

Short background and case study

Hi everybody,

a few days ago I spotted a very nice idea from the user hunvreus, who worked out a nice method to beautify drupal forms.
He describes this as a basic idea which has to be improved more:

The popup script works fine but need a bit of customization to take textareas, radios and checkboxes into account, the behavior could be improved to take the field focus into account, the style of the popup could be improved as well...

Over at AdaptiveThemes we've been hammering out how to give our designers better tools for designing for Drupal. At first we thought about a set of briefs, then that grew into packages (brief + stock images, logo etc) and then I struck on the idea of Design Profiles.

A Design Profile is a package including a sample site (say a blog, business site, Ubercart site etc), PSD templates, a detailed brief and stock images (sample logo, photos etc).

If you are a website designer, you probably know that having a clear and well prepared style guide can save an enormous amount of time for developer and save the designer from having to explain the design details over and over. That’s why I have created a blank website style guide template. I hope it will enable designers to speed up their design process and bring more beautiful designs to our community.

read more: http://mogdesign.eu/blog/free-website-style-guide-photoshop-template-my-...

Who said that Drupal sites are ugly? Take a look at 70 outstanding sites a an inspiration and a proof that Drupal can be beautiful.

http://mogdesign.eu/blog/70-beautiful-drupal-sites/

Has anyone seen the new Joomla showcase website?

Announcement
http://www.joomla.org/announcements/general-news/5233-community-showcase...

The Site Showcase, part of joomla.org
http://community.joomla.org/showcase/

It's community driven and has a lot of neat search features and categories. What does the new Drupal.org redesign have that rivals this?

The community wants great new themes for Drupal. How do we get designers and themers to create them? Someone discussed a contest but may designers are oppsed to that.

A suggestion: Call for volunteers to participate in a team effort where they will be grouped with others (perhaps 2 designers paired with 2 themers/UI specialists) and have them come up with a team name which will also be the name of their theme.

Give them a deadline and some publicity on d.o. with their bios and photos or portfolio links.