Posted by Amazon on November 3, 2007 at 4:03am
Hello, I have been contacted by at least four designers in the last few weeks who are eager to contribute to the Drupal project. I think we have crossed a user experience designer tipping point.
Now that I am a Drupal insider, I think we need someone else to write an open letter to designers who are interested in contributing to Drupal.
Here's an initial attempt to attract Information Architect based on feedback from DrupalCon Vancouver. http://drupal.org/node/49297
Any designers who are familiar with the Drupal project who are willing to help bridge to design communities.
Cheers,
Kieran
Comments
Damn good news
This is great. What can I do?
Just write a invitation? Actually the group you recently posted to - Coordinating efforts on Usability Improvement - could need any helping hand. So getting more people in will save us work and secure continuing progress.
Life is a process
Life is a journey, not a destination
Help us understand the designers goals, tasks, situation
You can help in many ways. First, the letter was intended to attract designers like yourselves to help with Drupal core, but there is no reason why there can not be a second letter for designers who are just using Drupal.
For designers who want to improve Drupal itself.
1) What are the goals of helping with the Drupal project from a designers perspective
2) What are the tasks involved in helping with the Drupal project from a designers perspective
3) What situation is a designer in when they are trying to help with the Drupal project.
-- Of course having the letter signed by designers who have contributed to the Drupal project in the past and reference contributions they have made would really help.
Some questions to address.
1) Who's the lead designer?
2) I have made some wire frames, designs, interaction design improvements. Who do I give my designs to, to get implemented?
3) Drupal should work in this particular way for my customer, why won't you change it to work this way for everyone?
4) What is the goal of Drupal, what's the long term vision?
5) Who are the users? How do they use it, what is the users goals?
6) Why don't you use the user experience technique that work in my office for your 200 000 person community distributed across the world?
7) How much time will this take?
8) Why isn't Drupal, which does thousands of things, as easy as Wordpress which does one thing really well?
9) How much time do I have to contribute? What's the life cycle of a Drupal release and how long will it take for my improvements to get adopted?
Let's start with this letter/book page and then get it posted and search optimized.
Cheers,
Kieran
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield
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Great idea
The most important point for designers is probably the freedom to create a site with any layout and design.
As a designer who was first attracted to Drupal by it's HTML overriding capabilities (and by the multilingual possibilities, to be fair), I can attest this is important.
A common fear among web designers, and one of the main barriers between developers and designers in agencies, is when a site ends up looking quite different than what the original mockups showed. It's often a communication problem, but Drupal's flexibility helps a lot.
Of course learning your CMS way, knowing it's limits is key. But regarding design, in Drupal I've found we're seldom limited by a not so flexible feature, like a chunk of HTML we can't override.
Oh by the way, is the open letter for any designer, or only designers who are fluent enough in HTML/CSS to create a custom theme?
Misread
Oops I realize I misread the original message, and skipped it was about "an open letter to designers who are interested in contributing to Drupal".