Posted by Gimmickless on December 8, 2010 at 5:24pm
A lot of the sales lit about Drupal goes into the profile of the sites that use them: whitehouse.gov, The Onion, The Economist. And yet, all of these sites are not particularly "Drupal-y". At least, their look and feel do not square up with an out-of-the-box theme. This is a plus for the customizability of Drupal.
As a newbie, I think it'd be cool to see the process of a professional theming. Alternately, to pick a popular site using Drupal and point out aspects of it that an average Joe like me can't pick up and immediately do.
Comments
Two things
There are two, somewhat separate things that come to my mind with your question.
First, rarely does professional front-end design and markup work from Drupal's default themes, Garland. Most people begin with a base theme like Zen or Fusion or one of the scores of others (or their own). These base themes reduce Drupal's output to some of its basics, increasing the possible outcomes and achieving "un-Drupal-y" looks.
Secondly, when you say "aspects of it [these Drupal sites]" I'm wondering if you mean aspects like organization and flow of content? If so, tools like CCK, Views, and Panels are often what powers the basics of content organization on Drupal sites.
This would definitively be a good topic for discussion.
Supplementary materials
Everything that Coltrane said plus,
I would also recommend you look into CAMP or Conference videos that themers and developers have demonstrated a process for theming elements on the page. There are some from scratch demos out there and a great book by Emma Jane http://www.frontenddrupal.com/ which is really excellent.
-- Zach (attack) Meyer
Panels
Panels is an interesting tool that allows you to build the page as you want it to be with some interesting levels of control. I'm not nearly as familiar with it as I'd like to be, and I'm hoping to do a talk on it at the Boulder meetup sometime this year.
Secondly, I'd suggest paging through the drupal theme garden - http://themegarden.org/drupal6/ - there's a lot of different out of the box themes out there to check out.
-john