Design Initiative

Over the past few months we've been working away behind the scenes on the Drupal Design site prototype. There are quite a number of technical considerations when building a new drupal.org sub-site so these needed to be ironed out before we could really show this off.

I've posted a number of screen grabs to Notable and we can use these to collect comments and feedback on the various screens throughout the site - you can leave general comments here but if you're wanting to leave comments about the actual screens please post those to Notable.

Drupal Design sub site will allow uploading of design files for sharing with other users. There are three main sections to the site:

• Challenges - where users contribute and collaborate on design problems for drupal.org, drupal projects, drupal core and so on.
• Assets - where users can upload and download high quality layered design files such as icons, templates, textures and so on.
• Discussion - where users can post comps for discussion, collaboration, feedback and so on.

The way we have been approaching changes to core templates has, at least afaict, been a piecemeal affair - we change one or two templates at a time working through the various markup issues until such time as we have some broad consensus and ta da, here's our new template.

This bottom-up-esque methodology seems reasonable because we we are not overhauling the entire system at any one time and are just looking to adjust or tweak parts of it.

I think this has worked OK in the past, however I tend to think this methodology has a few drawbacks.

These images were shot during the Design Initiative workshops - we ran two brainstorming groups concurrently to find answers to some difficult questions regarding the design brief for the new D8 theme design.

One thing that's been on my mind ever since the inception of the Design Initiative is some form of reputation system for design.drupal.org. If we can make this fly I'd be hugely in favor of it, and to that end I've put together a basic model of what this could look like (including an implementation), I'll get to that shortly, first I want to look briefly at what exists in Drupal ecosystem already - well, at least what I know of.

Lists of people who do stuff

Anyone spotted the demo for the Twenty Eleven theme for Wordpress 3.2 - http://twentyelevendemo.wordpress.com

I think its worth us tearing this apart and looking at the ideas they have bought in, I've only played with it briefly and its pretty nice actually. That said my initial impression was not so favorable (omg this is lame), however the more I play around with and uncover its various features the more I like it.

As part of our "Designers Toolkit" we are going to put up an example site to show all of Drupal cores front end output. This is to show designers what Drupal is and what it can do. I've been jamming some ideas and come up with simple site brief for this and wanted to open this up for public discussion befor we move ahead and actually build this.

Principles are important. They ensure consistent and fair decision making and they set objectives for us all to work towards. Most of all, they keep us honest.

We've been looking at establishing a set of principles that encapsulate our intentions in this initiative and give designers a strong story of Drupal. It would be great to get some feedback on the principles we have been working on.

The Design Initiative has three main goals - build a new core theme, build a new collaboration site for designers, and community outreach. The new core theme initiative is well under way and we're tantalizingly close to design.drupal.org becoming a reality. What we need to do now is step up a gear and start thinking about outreach.

To scope this discussion - this is about our new core theme for Drupal 8 and who it will serve, and how they will use it.

Its not possible to design and build something that will suit everyone, so we have been working on narrowing it down to identify who might use our new core theme and what their needs might be.

I have expanded on this and tried to think about skill-sets, constraints, features and what type of sites might they be building.