[consulting] What is "theme design" anyway?

[Kevin Reynen]

Do you think that the reason a large number of free, quality themes
don't exist is it is easier for people to sell those?  Why would a
designer spend the time genericizing a theme to upload Drupal.org,
when he/she can showcase it or their own site and sell it?

- Kevin Reynen

On 3/23/07, Laura Scott <laura at pingv.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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> Boulder, CO 80302
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>
>
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