Posted by megan_m on April 16, 2011 at 12:48am
Hello chix,
I hope you don't mind if I post this here. I thought it would be a safe and friendly place to discuss something that's been on my mind lately.
I have a background in both design and front-end development. I've been doing this for about 13 years, and got into drupal gradually over the past 4 years or so. I love being able to combine the creative and technical sides of web design.
The problem I'm coming across is that in Drupal world, it seems that these are usually separate activities. Is it possible to work with Drupal and do both design and theming? Is it possible to find a job these days doing both? Am I the only one who wants to continue to do design and theming together?
I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Comments
Hi, That combination of
Hi,
That combination of skills--designing and theming--seems like a serious advantage to me. I think it's not done that much because not many people have your skill set.
I run a collaborative consulting practice that mostly serves nonprofit orgs. I am a themer and builder, and I've built sites with designers who theme as well as back-end developers who theme. I have a brilliant colleague who does both design and theming, together, for Drupal and WordPress. I love working with her because she really gets how design and theme come together and she really understands how CMS software works at a deeper level, and that can make building (as well as the design process and project management) much faster.
I've worked with some really talented back-end developers who write pretty poor front-end code (the best ones usually admit it), and many who can but prefer to write a custom module to shortcut something that could be done in a more client-friendly, neat and straightforward way in the theme layer. In my case, I'm usually working with nonprofits on a tight budget. A custom module can mean extra expense for an org down the road come upgrade time and negatively affect their site's long-term sustainability.
In short, I think it sounds like a pretty great combo of skills, and you should sell it!
Thanks so much for your
Thanks so much for your response! I agree that this is a strong skill set to have - it seems like a lot of people want to split them up. I really love working with design and theming together, as your colleague does. Hopefully I can find someone to pay me to do it!
Megan McDermott
Woolwich Web Works: Custom Development
be aware of risks
Hello,
I do exactly the same and I love it! Out of necessity I became one-man-team and do Drupal web development as well, even though I usually don't go as far as writing own moduels. And the huge number of available modules is usually sufficient to build great websites with complicated functionality, without a line of custom php. So I’m usually responsible for whole package: design + front-end implementation + development.
I agree that combination of design and front-end implementation is a gold one! You save lots of time and frustration. So many times I had to work with 3-rd party designs made by people who had no idea about the html or css, not mentioning the limitations of CMS. Very often the designs were first shown to the client and then to the front-end developer. Client would get all excited about pretty fonts and fancy menus, and then get highly disappointed hearing about technical limitations and eventually very different final result.
While designing I can make smart choices making designs which are both good looking and easy to implement.
There are however some risk I see in this combination:
- you might prevent yourself from "going wild" with design, keeping in mind that you will have to implement it later on, resulting in very square, simple designs.
- you might feel tempted to modify the design during implementation, as there won't be any designer fiercely defending every shadow, gradient and rounded corner...
So keep that in mind, go wild from time to time and keep enjoying Drupal!
Greetings
Bogumila