created on Tue, 2008-05-13 09:48

Hi Folks,
thanks for coming out to DrupalCamp Vancouver this past Friday and Saturday. It was great to see such a big turnout. I should give big thanks to Ariane, Dale, and Raincity's own DaveO for organizing this event.

Steve, Hubert and I spent a number of hours on top of our regularly full schedule to prepare a slightly extended version of the theming talk we gave a few months ago to the Vancouver user group.

created on Thu, 2008-01-24 15:29

If you're in the Vancouver area on January 31st (that's one week from today!), come down to the Raincity Studios office in Gastown for a quick overview of Drupal Theming from the ground up.

This talk, organized by the Vancouver League of Drupalers, will be free to all comers (space permitting). It's starts at 6:30pm, January 31st. Full details can be found at the groups.drupal.org page for Vancouver.

Hubert Florin, Steve Krueger and I will take you from the basics to the real details. We may not complete the whole theme in the short time allotted, but the plan is to give you the best tips and resources you can use to propel yourself to Drupal Theming fluency.

Here are the bullet points:

• Creating a theme from scratch / the theme folder
• An intro to creating your own "base" theme
• Some of our favourite Themeable Functions, and how to apply others
• Theming best practices

We'll post the notes on the blog and http://groups.drupal.org/vancouver if you can't make. Hope to see you there!

created on Fri, 2007-05-04 15:49

Part II of III. Read Part I.

Document and Code Better

What a fun topic. Thankfully, Garrett Dimon injected this section with both humour and some hard-learned lessons.

Obviously no one wants to make documentation, but it needs to be done. On the flip side, documentation for the sake of documentation is not a positive thing either - It can often lock you into a way of thinking or operating that may not even be right.

Essentially, documentation needs to communicate something valuable regardless of how many pages it takes up. Design for people not bullet lists.

created on Fri, 2007-05-04 14:41

Brian Jamison's Must Have Apps consist of Trac, Drupal and an as yet unnamed Ruby on Rails ecommerce app.

Trac

Trac is an Open-Source project management system that also provides an interface for the Subversion, version control system. We don't use Trac ourselves but it comes highly recommended from the community at large.

Unfuddle is the paid alternative we're familiar with.

created on Thu, 2007-05-03 16:42 Understanding Design

The session began with a few choice examples of good design. Dimon pointed out some of his favourites from a range of sources such as architecture and maps.

The Target pill bottle (link 1 | link 2) is a personal inspiration of mine as well.

“Good Design is Problem-solving”

He satisfied a potentially difficult client request by not changing the colour of the image in the foreground as was requested, but rather by changing the background colour to make the image in the fore stand out.

In another example he showed a traditional, online movie listing system turned on its side. This new perspective marries time, location and title allowing the end user to choose what matters to her.

Cultivate Culture

It’s fairly easy to point out what is good and applaud it, but how do we apply it into our workflow or very work culture?

Dimon cited Threadless.com as a prime example of subtle design details that improve usability. Their product availability is displayed in icons by size. When an item is out of stock it receives a grey background colour rather than the regular deep-blue. A link to reprint the item is also provided in human-readable text (although it is an email grab).

He mentioned the addition of the UNDO feature to certain web apps and the advancement of Web Typography as two more key movements in better interface.

One thing I hadn’t heard before was Conway’s Law:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. - Wikipedia

Think Critically

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results" - Benjamin Franklin

So the greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will lead to a solution.

I liked Dimon's example of the study made on warplanes during WWII. The study consisted of examinations of the bullet patterns on planes that returned safely from action. The generals apparently pointed to all of the bullet-ridden parts of the planes and said "let's add armour here." They had to be reminded that these were diagrams of the planes that came back.

"Too often we measure everything and understand nothing" - Jack Welch

to be continued...

End of Part I. Read Part II. Garrett's Notes