[consulting] Drupal-friendly Graphic Design (new subject)

[Michael Goldsmith]

Normally, I try to keep pretty quiet on this list, but I really have a bone
to pick here.  You're missing a major piece of the puzzle.  There are 3
elements that go into any kind of site:

1) What it looks like- design and theming
2) How it works- programming
3) What it's supposed to do- business rules.  

That third point, I feel is the most important one.  I think that we, not
just as the Drupal community, but as programmers in general, oftentimes lose
sight of that.  Most programmers focus on programming the site correctly.
And that is definitely a very important thing, don't get me wrong.  Bad code
is bad code, and is unacceptable.  But we can't forget that we not only have
to program the site correctly, but that we program the correct site.  It is
the business rules that drive the design.  It is the business rules that
decide what the developer programs, and to an extent, how they develop as
well.

You can't blame designers for not being creative enough for you.  Necessity
may be the mother of all invention, however, people are wired to read and
learn in a relatively limited way.  For the most part, and there are
exceptions to this, we read left to right, top to bottom.  The "prime" real
estate is the upper left hand corner.  Attention radiates out from that
corner for about the size of a logical sheet of paper.  Go beyond that, and
you're going to lose their attention.  There's only so much you can do with
that.  You don't want your users to have to "figure out" how to read your
site.  You don't want your users to have to hunt down your navigation to get
around your site.  People are not exactly starved for reading material.  If
they can't intuitively figure out how to navigate your website, they'll just
go somewhere else.  I've seen dozens of themes where they try to be slick
and move the navigation around to various places on your page, and that's
simply not going to work.  When people are forced to read in different
manner than they are accustomed to, you lose their attention really quickly,
and they go away.  

Now I'm not saying that sites have to be boring.  Definitely not.  A
talented graphic designer is a talented graphic designer.  You can still
have beautiful eye catching work that still adheres to the basic guidelines
of how people read and learn.  But your problem with that designer was not
with his design work, but the fact that he didn't know CSS.  Your problem
was that your designer was also your themer.  Designers don't necessarily
know CSS.  They know photoshop.  And that's fine.  That's what they do.
They're designers, not themers.  I do a fair amount of theming, and I can't
design anything in photoshop to save my life.  I've got no artistic ability
whatsoever.  But that doesn't mean that I'm not a good themer.  It just
means that I'm not a designer.  And that's a pretty important distinction to
make.  Finding someone who can do both effectively is very rare.  Whomever
hired that person, obviously either didn't make that distinction, or wasn't
able to catch the designer's BS, when he was saying "oh yeah, sure, CSS...
No problem."  And that's kind of telling too.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Matt Chapman
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 6:25 PM
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] Drupal-friendly Graphic Design (new subject)



mark at markery.com wrote:
> Is there a design that can't be done in Drupal? I always figured you 
> could do anything that you can do with standard HTML.
>
No, but some designs are easier than others.

> Shouldn't the design drive the programming rather than the other way 
> round?
>
No, because of the above. If you decide how it looks before you decide 
how it works, you'll inevitably have forgotten to account for some 
feature in your design. But since you can Drupal will let you design the 
look of a feature any way you can possibly imagine, you can start with 
the features and then add design on top.

The problem is, even most designers lack imagination. Once they see it 
in Garland, they can't think outside the box. I haven't figured out how 
to solve this chicken egg problem yet.

But in my experience, whenever there's a problem implementing a design 
in Drupal, the weakness is in the designer/themer, and not with Drupal.

I once worked with a third-party designer selected by the client who was 
used to doing static sites via Dreamweaver. I provided HTML and CSS 
templates, and all he had to do was tweak to his liking. What he 
delivered completely ignored the templates I had provided, and although 
he tried to get the client to blame Drupal, and nearly succeeded, he 
ultimately he was forced to admit that he didn't really understand how 
to use CSS. I then spent three days hacking at his Dreamweaver output to 
make it work, and re-slicing and compressing his images so that the user 
didn't need to download a full MB of background images for each page.

A nice portfolio does not a web designer make... :-(

-Matt





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