Designers and Information Architects

Improving usability is a top priority for Drupal 7: http://buytaert.net/usability-usability-and-usability

So, it is also a big topic for Drupalcon in Szeged. Besides presentations and sessions we should work out a format for actually getting some stuff done, too. Let's call it a Usability Sprint. We should focus on fixing the actual issues found by the two usability tests.

The best way to propose new UI improvements for Drupal is writing proof-of-concept modules. It would be great to get some of those done during a focussed Usability Sprint.

So, how's this for an ideal usability sprint scenario:

BoF Usability Sprint Day 1

• zoom in on 1 or 2 issues we already decided upon before the conference
  (redo admin categories, modules page, permissions page…)
• bring your ideas and proposals
• discuss the options, decide on 1 or 2 things we can work on.

example:
- do a card sort on the admin categories
- discuss the different 'dashboard' approaches people already use
- choose 2 options we want to compare / test

another example:
- let's pick a nice chunk of core interface text: labels, descriptions, help
- rework them for clarity, consistency and brevity.

Web conference: http://acquia.acrobat.com/keyperformanceindicator/
For Participants: Access Code - 450345#
Dial - (712) 432-1600
International Dial-in Numbers:
Austria - 0820 4000 1552
Belgium - 070 35 9974
France - 0826 100 256
Germany - 01805 00 76 09
Ireland - 0818 270 021
Italy - 848 390 156
Netherlands - 0870 001 920
Spain - 902 886025
Switzerland - 0848 560 179
UK - 0870 35 204 74

This call will be recorded, I apologize for the late or night call for European members, but this was the time when Mike was available.

In preparation for the anticipated release of the redesign RFP, I am soliciting the names and contacts for firms or individuals who are interested in receiving a copy of the RFP and all official communications about the project.

The scope of the project includes:
- research
- information architecture
- design and branding

(The full draft RFP can be found here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11336)

Firms or individuals who can show successful experience in one or more of these areas on projects of similar size are encouraged to participate in the bid process.

Stumbled on this yesterday...
http://www.drupalmuseum.com/

Nice to see a design-oriented showcase of Drupal sites!

~~~
{ TopNotchThemes } Gorgeous, unique Drupal designs with Panels 2 support, plus Ubercart themes!

call in: +1 605-475-6000 access 333892

URL: http://connect.studiomodule.com (15 users)

For our bi-weekly call, we'll be reviewing hosting options and hopefully making some progress with project management and training materials.

This week we will be using a conference bridge set up on InstantConference.com. Hopefully that'll eliminate issues with those of you on VoIP or Skype (or the embarrassing limitations of our in-house phone system!)

We'll be doing a conference call on Monday to discuss progress on the Design for Drupal site, and hopefully be able to display some theming work.

Please call in to +1 305-238-8875 to join the call.

I look forward to speaking with you then!

There's lots of Drupal development shop success stories. However, there is not enough information for designers who have considered using Drupal to understand how it works for Designers and how they can use it to grow their own business.

http://drupal.org/node/247985

If you are a designer, with a design portfolio prior to using Drupal, please consider writing a case study for Designers who are considering using Drupal in their practice.

On July 15th & 16th, the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine will host the Higher Education Web Symposium.

This two-day conference will provide tools, tips and techniques for web designers, developers, programmers, and project managers to help us all create better and more usable applications and websites. Jared Spool leads off the all star cast of presenters. Additional scheduled presenters include: Eric Meyer, Dana Chisnell, Stephanie Sullivan, and others!

Got top notch CSS skills and looking for steady Drupal theming work?

We are TopNotchThemes, the premier Drupal theme store. We're looking for 1-2 new members of our team to help create killer Drupal themes. This is an ongoing position that will require a commitment of 20-40 hours per week. We are geographically flexible, but you must have excellent English communication skills.

Ok, icon drawing time! Here's my suggestions for some specs and guidelines to get started with. All feedback welcome.

In the attachment:

• an icon template file for Inkscape
• basic directory structure for organising and categorisation of the icon sources and png renders.

The directories are mostly empty, but have a look in the applications and the mimetypes folder, there are SVG files for:

• forum icons
• calendar icons
• mimetype icons (with PSD sources for 16 and 32px versions which are actually further developed then the SVG!)

Hi, last week at Drupalcon Boston we had an entire track dedicated to design and user experience. As the conference organizer, I specifically designed this track into the conference program to help build momentum within the Drupal design community. Claudio and others took the initiative and created a special new group called the Design and Outreach group.

Hy
I'm new in drupal and I start with drupal 6 to study. I want to make a content type for tables where I can add, remove, or modify fields in a table Can anybody help me with this problem. Any help will be good. Thank's

Kieran - moved back to the designers and information architecture

Here are some steps we need to take in order to get our site up and going. Feel free to put your name next to items you're working on.

<

ol>

Because of Drupal's special nature, there are alot of us hybrids in the community: designers with an interest in developing and developers with an interest in designing. I would like to create a place/discussions that dealt with this crossover.

I am speaking from the design pov because, well, i am a designer first and coder/developer second (read: way second). Also, I think that we can close the gap by developing several simple things:

<

ol>

EDIT: There will be a BOF discussion tomorrow, Wed morning at 9:00am here at Drupalcon. Please join the discussion and share your thoughts.

Contract job to apply an new, finished design (eg, Photoshop files, style specs) to a Drupal 5 theme for a new skin for the rSmart website:
http://www.rsmart.com/

We will supply complete Photoshop files and style specs of finished site design developed modularly with Drupal in mind, as well as Drupal 5 instance already configured with modules/content/navigation.

Emphasis on phptemplate/CSS solutions, Drupal without hacks, usability, standards compliance, eventual Drupal 6 migration.

Scheduled delivery before 4/1/2008. Portland, OR area preference, but not required.

Hello, I'm just posting here to let everyone know that the bulk of the new theming handbook is up. Most of it has been rewritten and reorganized. I hope it is accurate and clear enough to get everyone familiar with the theming system.

It's still missing sections on sub-theming (which can get really fancy BTW). I hope to get a few solid explanations and illustrations on the possibilities. Engineless themes and theme engine sections are not there yet but I don't think it's too critical.

JavaScripting could use some help too. I hope someone can fill that in.

.

.

As some of you know, I've recently taken over maintenance of Inline and Image Assist, and initiated the Wysiwyg project. That was not only caused by personal interest, but also to take the necessary steps to realize the long awaited Inline API. You might ask yourself, what those three modules have in common or to do with each other at all: They deal with user input, allow to embed complex contents into a content, and provide an interactive GUI for that. If you already had the chance to work with them, you already know that there is a rather hidden, non-obvious hard-dependency between them.

Although I'd really like to discuss both topics (Inline and Wysiwyg support) separately, the gained experience on these topics enforces us to discuss them concurrently. The following mockup hopefully explains why: (see attachment to view in full size)

Drupal 5 Theming by Ric Shreves

If you are a designer wanting to learn Drupal, this book is for you. It is written by a designer so there are no programming sections full of code. It shows you how you can customize Drupal's HTML and CSS in detail. The book has a good amount of screen shots, charts, and other visual aids that really help the right side of the brain.

Part of the usability efforts is coming up with some Drupal specific icons. Icons show up here and there in Drupal core but more often in contributed modules. We should try to connect and align these efforts. Make them more consistent in application and look/feel.

Styleguides and design tips:

• updated for Leopard: Apple Human Interface Guidelines

Trellon is announcing multiple vacancies, effective immediately. Please send resumes including cover letters and salary requirements to jobs@trellon.com. No phone calls please.

Position Title: Technical Lead
Reports To: Director of Development
Term: Permanent, Full Time
Classification: Professional, technical
Travel Involved: Infrequent
Salary: $70,000 - $120,000 / annual
Location: Telecommute

Introduction

projectstars is a new business network which gives experts the chance to show off their experience, network, and find work. Consisting of 300 enterprise communities, we are the first business network to be giving stock to our members in a 'Blog for Stock' event where every three months the top 100 projectstars receive shares in projectstars inc..

Our requirements

5W Mignon-Media is a consulting company for media based in New York city.

We are looking for a experienced Drupal Developer on a contract basis. No geographic limits.

Please send bio + links to : jfm(at)mignon-media(dot)com

No calls.

Hey people
ive just posted a wishlist for the image in core, that walkah were talking bout at the drupalcon barcelona.
i thought it would be a good idea to share this - so we can figure out what we want in this "imageincoreoneandforall" :)

link to the original post at my blog: http://morten.dk/node/174
flickr screens: http://flickr.com/photos/mortendk/tags/drupalimagesincorewishlist/

its still a working draft so spelling errors missing stuff etc ... ;)

Dear Walkah - the wishlist for images in core
original post http://morten.dk/node/174/

Hi. I'd like to document some links to Views2 UI mockups here. Links to the files have been bouncing around in IRC, maybe this can be a place for further thoughts on how Views2 could best present it's functionality to the user. I'll be updating any new screens here.

These all concern the “create new view” part of the UI, looking for ways to present all the available settings in a more compact layout.

first:
- views2-merlinsmockup.png

The Digital team at Hachette-Filipacchi (UK) are currently running an alpha for a fun social-networking (Drupal-flash) application for teen magazine Sugar. We are actively seeking a ninja Drupal themer to help trouble shoot our Alpha by getting the theming right and the overall presentation layer as close to what has been designed.

We are a small team of three (one biz, one developer, one sysadmin) based in Canada and the UK and are looking for a designer with a flair for web2.0 design to help make our new business network (/not/ my open4.org) based on drupal 5.2 look cool for our launch on 1 Oct.

I am looking for a drupal developer to create a new online community serving unpaid carers and caregivers. This site will be a hosted web application that features a community portal, social networking and custom functionality.

Drupal will be used to implement the community and social networking components of this site.

Community

1. RSS news aggregater for carer feeds and blogs

2. Digg style front-page

3. User evaluations and ratings of various service providers (Lawyers, Financial Advisors, Healthcare Service Providers, etc)

Seeking Creative Drupal Web Designers

We are looking to design a new Drupal site for our company, and are seeking someone with experience in designing (not necessarily backend development) Drupal websites.

We are a creative game technology company who is unfortunately aesthetically challenged when it comes to the business of designing websites that look good. We currently have an internal employee setting up the backend of our site for Drupal, but he needs a creative counterpart to make our site the best it can be.

I'm thinking about using the signup module for an online class registration process, but I really need a waiting list feature when the classes reach capacity. Has anyone worked on a feature like this, for signup or anything else?

I found one mention of a wait-list feature here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/4151 but haven't stumbled across it anywhere else. Has anyone else had a need for this feature? I'm open to suggestions, or better alternatives than working with Signup, if anyone has any ideas for me.

Thanks!
Jen

Hi everyone,

Just thought I would let you know about an event I participated in last weekend called Full Code Press, where an Australian and NZ team built a site in 24 hours for 2 charities.

I was on the Aussie team, and we used Drupal as our CMS. We didn't win, but it was a great experience.

I have posted some of my thoughts here.

A heads up on theme development for Drupal 6.

Thanks to the new theme registry by merlinofchaos, there's a nice side effect of being able to intercept theme functions from devel.

What this provides is the ability to list all themable functions used in a page making it a lot more understandable. There is working code but it still needs work. If anyone has ideas on presenting this information please post it. For now it just dumps it into a table but we can get pretty fancy with this, especially with jQuery.

Here's the issue queue:

Hello,
We have a large corporate intranet running Drupal.
We want to start some communities of practice websites using the organic groups module.

My question is, should I create a separate website (like group.drupal.org) to host them, or build it right into my intranet?

I have heard reports of the other content types becoming a "mess" after the organic groups module is enabled.

I know it depends on how we want to use information, but I was wondering if anyone had faced that choice before.

Any ideas?

I recently headbutted my wife's Cartoon Smart flash tutorials long enough to create two extremely simple flash players: mp3 and flv. If you look in the FLAs, I've limited the actionscript to the bare minimum.

But that's as far as I can realistically go. So, calling Flash devs who might be lurking: express your intent right here. I can handle the review and commits if you think you can improve these players and are willing for your contributions to be GPL and Drupal housed.

Greetings again.

After the excellent work from yoroy in the Donate spotlight banner (now in rotation on Drupal.org) I am back again to request help for another design issue for the Drupal.org website. We want to prominantly place a donate link on the Drupal.org site that shows on all pages. We are requesting design ideas for how to implement this into the current BlueBeach theme. Yoroy has again stepped forward with a design proposal:

Joomla survey says who uses joomla

Some comments about the survey design

Understanding the users
1) Identify sector, what is your job, what computing knowledge do you have

These are all good questions that provide an understanding of the users.

Frequency
2) How long have you used Joomla

-Here they miss the opportunity to discover usage patterns, which are important considerations in user centered design. Designing for all day usage versus quick update usage.

Hi, I'd like to get a banner graphic for a block on the Drupal.org home page. When we put up the survey in a banner block it tends to get a lot more responses, which should help improve the over all accuracy.

If anyone has the skills and time to do this , it would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Kieran

Greetings.

I am a volunteer fund raiser on the Board of the Drupal Association. We are working on better integration between the main Drupal.org website and the association.drupal.org website. One of the obvious things we are working on first is a 'Spotlight' image for the Drupal association - these are the graphics that show up in the rounded box on the upper right of drupal.org; 'Drupal Planet' 'Security Announcements' etc.

The United Nations Millennium Campaign is seeking proposals for ongoing front-end design of their Drupal website at http://endpoverty2015.org. The site's backend (database, code, and navigational structure) are already in place as is a a basic theme and several node types. This work is specifically focused on theme creation and design for a few outstanding key landing pages and node types.

It's time for another Drupal meeting in Boulder at the pingVision offices.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I organized the first meeting over emails and then the second was organized here via the brand new "Beta" groups.drupal site.

Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to write in and link to Steven's excellent post titled "Drupal's Designer Future" in case you didn't see it:

http://acko.net/blog/drupals-designer-future

Let's work together to make Drupal better for designers! There is a lot that can be done that will make our lives easier and benefit the entire Drupal community. It's not an easy task, but let's figure out a game plan and priorities to get some enhancements done now so they can be included in the next release.

Your thoughts?

This project started about 4 months ago. At first it was just to contribute a nice little theme but it changed into a source of learning and experimentation on what could be done with Drupals' theming layer.

The code is commented pretty well so I hope others can learn from what's been done. Some of the ideas that went into the theme will eventually end up in the handbook and a site will be dedicated to it also.

As a newbish theme-monkey who's been tinkering with things for a while now, I've got a quick question for the ranks: Is Zen the best "baseline" theme to use when creating your own theme for 5.0? Is anyone working on a basic multi-column template bare-bones type theme? I thought I'd seen one crop up for 4.7 a while back... Just wondering...

Lullabot has another round of workshops coming up in January. We've got a great space in Providence, RI centrally located for people in both the Boston and New York areas -- and close to the airport for people coming from further away. Over the course of the week, we'll be building a single project – a Drupal-based CRM and attendees can sign up for individual workshops, or stay the whole week to see the project from beginning to end. Here's the rundown:

Project: Website redesign and production for Non-profit

Description: looking for a mentor for implementation of Website redesign within the Drupal content management system. I am a web designer and producer with fairly in-depth knowledge of web design and production techniques (XHTML, CSS and some javascript) and very basic working knowledge of PHP, phpMyAdmin, and Drupal. I have taken Lullabot’s Theming course (SF – October) and this is my first project using Drupal.

The website is for a non-profit that produces initiation weekends for young men ages 13 – 20. You can see their current website at www.ymuw.org. The redevelopment of their site will consist of two phases.

YAML is a (X)HTML/CSS layout Framework
http://www.yaml.de/

For Drupal

http://www.yaml-fuer-drupal.de/

Read on

http://drupal.org/node/92325

Working over the weekends is no fun, but having friends around helps.

In order to brighten things up a bit, Trellon will be conducting a theme development workshop this Saturday, October 7, 2006 from 12:00 to 2:00 PM EST. We will be discussing CSS design considerations, cross browser issues, best practices with phptemplate, implementing AJAX within user interfaces and more. During the meeting, we will be working on an actual project and sharing the tips and tricks we use to design great Web sites. We will also be doing a question and answer session at the end of the meeting, so come prepared.

Hey group...
I got home from walking my two dogs this evening and found the last two posts on our board... one by Ber and the other by Moshe.

If you're subscribing to Drupal Designers, you'll have already seen those.

So, I wanted to post a follow up to this idea that the Theme group and the Designers group are overlapping... I don't think that is the case at all.

Been designing for over 10 years...

First off, let me say that I'm new to drupal (and loving it) but I'm not at all new to web design or design period... I've been in this game for over 10 years now... Seen a lot of stuff come and go... I've been working in Photoshop since version 2... and I taught myself Perl back before PHP was even imagined. (of course now I do PHP as well though) :)

I am a bit worried that this group does 90% what the "theme developers" group does.

Can we get "together" and decide the differences and then publish these differences in our group description?