Drupal Design Camp LA conference on February 5-6, 2011 in Los Angeles, California

Design for Drupal comes to LA! The first annual Drupal Design Camp LA conference is officially scheduled for February 5-6, 2011, in Los Angeles, California.

Registration for Drupal Design Camp LA is done at http://2011.ddcla.org and you're welcome to sign up. Registering for the conference is as simple as signing up for an account. We'll be launching the full site soon with information about the venue, local hotels, restaurants and coffeeshops, and begin accepting session proposals.

The Drupal Design Camp LA conference follows in the footsteps of the Drupal Design Camps at Standford, in Boston and in Prague, which have successfully brought designers, themers, developers, information architects and usability engineers together. These conferences are just like DrupalCamps but offer sessions and presentations specifically about design and theming topics such as grid design, usability testing, sustainable, additive approaches to theming and so on.

What's Design for Drupal?

Translating a design into a Drupal "theme" is often a high barrier and it has been difficult and costly for many designers to have a "design-driven approach" to Drupal. Feedback from the design community has often focused on the difficulties of designing for the Drupal theme system, which combines several programming disciplines and languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.

Design for Drupal is a relatively new movement in the Drupal community to help make Drupal more friendly and approachable to designers, information architects and usability engineers, and in general anyone who is interested in customizing Drupal's output to the web page. At its core, Design for Drupal is about inviting the larger design community together to be a part of the Drupal community and enabling designers, usability engineers, developers, information architects and themers to coordinate efforts, come up with creative ideas and work towards making Drupal easier to use and look beautiful.

Location

Drupal Design Camp LA 2011 is being hosted by the Spring Arts Tower in Downtown Los Angeles. The same venue where the Drupal Everywhere: Making Mobile Websites with Drupal event was held in November, 2010, the Spring Arts Tower is an office building for more than a hundred creative companies and independent artists, designers, architects, photographers, painters, production companies and ad agencies.

It is located at 453 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, CA 90013, and is easily accessible by public transportation and there is affordable all-day public parking in several nearby parking lots.

Formerly the Los Angeles headquarters of the Citizens National Bank and then the Crocker Bank, the Spring Arts Tower is a Nationally Registered Historic Building and features original Art Deco designs, art nouveau details, sculptured brass, acres of fine Italian marble, Batcheldor tile, California alder and tiger oak. There are ten vaults located on four floors. It is a host to LA Fashion Week and the Downtown Art Walk, and is a frequent filming location for countless television shows including 24, Numb3rs and Heroes, and movies such as Rush Hour, Meet the Fockers and Spiderman 3.

Sponsors and individual contributors

With help from our generous sponsors and help from individual contributors, we are working on making Drupal Design Camp LA a free event. This conference is, however, organized entirely by volunteers and there are costs involved in running the conference, from paying for our venue and organizing food to printing schedules and providing services to the deaf and hearing-impaired members of our community.

Please contact the LA Drupal managers if you'd like to discuss sponsorship opportunities. Sponsorships are immensely appreciated and all contributions go directly towards funding conference operation costs. Any funds not used for the camp will donated to the the LA Drupal Association for other events and infrastructure, promotion and distribution needs. Thank you!