Dos and Don'ts for Designing in Drupal

This session will focus on strategic tips and tricks for creating visually stunning and highly functional Drupal sites in collaboration with creative partners and colleagues. Discussed will be various dos and don’ts associated with designing for Drupal and building custom Drupal themes. Using examples from actual Drupal projects, this session will talk about how to work with both in-house and external design partners using a best practices-driven workflow for designing and building Drupal themes. We will talk about how developing Drupal sites is different from traditional Web site development, and how to avoid common pitfalls that can make the process of designing and building a Drupal site much more difficult than it needs to be. This session will not cover the fundamentals of design, the nuts and bolts of building a theme, or how to write HTML and CSS. Rather, the goal will be to help people involved in Drupal theme development and/or creating designs for Drupal sites understand the unique challenges of the system and learn how to develop a workflow and set of best practices that will enable them to create sites that are not only highly functional, but beautiful as well.