[consulting] What is "theme design" anyway?

[The Golden Condor !]

Looking at all these designs, and getting my hands dirty
experimentally, similar questions to Laura's came to my mind: How does
one learn to create a good theme? And by good I mean one that well
written, maintainable, easy to modify, and less likely to have
security and other bugs. I've seen some "snippets" or drupal.org, but
in most cases they're just snippets. And there aren't enough of them
to create a complete picture.

I a feel that a few case studies that walk through the development of
a good looking (not necessarily $$$ worthy) design illustrating best
practices in theme development would be a great asset to the Drupal
community, especially for the new comers.

Cheers,

Tony A.A.

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