I thought I would start a discussion regarding the ability for designers to be able to contribute to Drupal and a possible way in which this could be achieved. I'm warey about posting this in any of the issue queues at the moment as I wanted to get some initial feedback first.
The idea would be to have an additional project type created titled "Graphics" which could have some form of categorization for designers to be able to contribute a variety of graphics to help others and to start collaborative projects with themers and developers.
The following is a list of what designers could be contributing to help Drupal and the community:
- Theme designs; these would be PSD's that could be sliced and unsliced to get more contib themes into the community benefiting both current themers and new themers joining the community.
- Icons; Everyone loves icons.
- Page Elements; these would be graphical elements of a layout that could be added to an existing website.
- Marketing media; this would range from Brochure templates to site badges, i'd see these being used for Drupalcamps and any other Drupal events.
This is the next stage on from what others are working on with regards to getting designers into Drupal, for those designers already in Drupal we could do with a feature/ability to contribute similar to modules and themes.
All feedback is welcomed and appreciated.
Comments
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Designs for themes I can see a case for, and really this can mostly be done right now - for example creating a project node and mark the project as "seeking co-maintainer". I'd agree we could make these tools more designer-centric and give some options so its easier to find theme designs that need a developer to write the code. If Theme projects had categories (like modules) this would be easy.
Icons and page elements seem different imo, this really would need a new project type, my main question here is how would this differentiate from the many sites that already provide this service, such as iconfinder.com; will we just get a lot of low quality submissions (this did happen with themes when Artiseer first hit the scene).
For marketing media I would think we just need a tag so people can post an issue to the drupal issue queue and tag it as "needs designer" or something like that.
With regards to icons and
With regards to icons and page elements I was thinking of keeping things under one roof so to speak, I would hope that if the project type was created it wouldn't get abused and the contributions would have originality that you wouldn't find on the example you linked. After reaading http://drupal.org/node/606490 and with my own interest in icon design I thought it would be another way to contribute, more for developers to use in modules and themers that wanted a quick way of finding some icons when on d.o.
The marketing media one is a good point, I was sent a link to something similar recently advertised in the marketing group but unless I had been sent that link there was no way for me to have found that post. With that kind of scenario it would be fine to use a tag system so that it reaches the necessary audience but my thinking with those types of graphics being contributed would be for general/community use not just relating to d.o specifically.
That's one that probably needs further discussion, but the theme designs are my main focus as I see them as being the most beneficial.