[consulting] What is "theme design" anyway?

[Laura Scott]

I'm getting into this conversation late, so I'll follow suit by  
hijacking the thread into another tangent to the topic.

A lot of issues have been raised here (as well as in the discussion  
after Dries' presentation this morning at OSCMS).

I'm wondering what the current state of contributed Drupal themes has  
to do with how easy/hard it is to theme for Drupal for, e.g.,  
corporate clients or with what a theme repository full of proprietary  
themes would provide. It seems to me that there is a world of  
difference between contributed themes, one-off designs for clients,  
and theme showcases, and the challenges for each are somewhat different.

What's more, I feel it's important to remember that designing for  
Drupal, or any robust CMS, involves a lot more than static graphic  
design and is a lot more complex than theming for just one kind of  
content, like a blog. Proper theming involves 4 dimensions, including  
the layers (z axis) and the time through which the theme moves as the  
user interacts with it.

It can be challenging when Drupal still has some presentation logic  
built into key modules, but that's diminishing, and when it comes  
down to it, there's virtually nothing that cannot be overridden or  
replaced using best practices. This makes the challenge to theming  
both easier and more difficult. Easier because there's less to fight  
against. More difficult because if you can do anything, how to you  
theme for that?

I know the vast majority of designers are allergic to programming,  
but when you're talking about interactive design, the program is  
integral to the design, and while you may be able to avoid the code  
syntax, you won't be able to avoid the code logic -- not if you're  
doing a full GUI design. Even if you took a design from the various  
skinning sites out there and ported it to Drupal, you'll have to deal  
with challenges of complexity and multiple content types that are  
beyond the realm of what most themes have to accommodate.

So is the question how to learn how to theme a custom Drupal site? Or  
how to build up a richer, more beautiful theme repository in contrib?  
Or how to showcase existing designs?

Laura

•
Laura Scott
pingVision, LLC
laura at pingv.com

1350 Pine Street, Suite 1
Boulder, CO 80302
303.415.2559
http://pingv.com


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