This past weekend Scott and I joined more than 300 Designers/Themers at the third annual Design4Drupal, Boston. It was a great opportunity to connect with other designers in the Drupal community and to learn a few new tricks. I also had the chance to present two sessions, one on Advanced Web Typography, with Scott, and another on CSS3 & Preprocessors.
This weekend, more than 1,500 self-proclaimed "hackers" are gathering in cities around the world to work on technology solutions for world problems, including advance warning for severe weather situations, tracking lost children in large-scale emergencies, real time climate data comparison, and more than 60 others. The "hackathon" events are part of a global initiative called Random Hacks of Kindness, founded in 2009 in a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank.
We had the incredible privilege of working with the RHoK team to redesign and rebuild RHoK.org in Drupal 7.
At the closing session for DrupalCon Chicago the announcement was made that the next North American DrupalCon will be in Denver, Colorado. What awesome news for the Colorado Drupal community! In the days before Chicago, there were a number of materials that needed to be created to go along with the Denver announcement. I had the privilege of designing print materials, the slides for the presentation, and the announcement website. In the interest of keeping things as open as possible, I thought I would share the process used in creating those materials.
We spend significant time and effort in the information architecture phase of projects, during which our principle goal is to create an effective sitemap. As with other steps in the process, we pitch an initial recommendation, solicit feedback, host discussions, make some changes, rinse and repeat. Also similar to other parts of the process, it is critical to establish metrics that define a particular final product as successful. With sitemaps, this has proven particularly important.
We've been working for the past few months on a redesign for aashe.org and are glad to announce that the site is live and ready for the public. We're still ironing out a few kinks but I thought I would take this time to cover a bit of the process around the redesign. This project was unique in that AASHE had a development team that would be implementing the site. It was great working with Julia, Matt and the rest of the AASHE team and they did an excellent job tackling the development side of things. So with development taken care of, we were able to focus solely on design and front-end interaction.
Over the past few months, we've been working to redesign our website to better reflect our identity, our work, and our process. The new design gives us the flexibility to create custom designs for featured projects, a better framework for writing blog posts, and a much prettier interface, both on the front and back-end.
At DrupalCamp Colorado, Scott and I presented Enhancing Drupal Interfaces with Javascript & Flash. We covered why you should use Javascript or Flash, how best to use these technologies, and some examples from recent projects where we've improved the user experience.
Drupal Camp Colorado 2010 was a blast! The weekend camp (no we didn't stay in tents) was packed full of interesting sessions about Drupal. My colleague Scott Reynen and I presented a session over the weekend titled "I CAN HAZ AWESOME? -- Advanced Theming Techniques". During the question/answer time at the end of our session, one gentleman asked for our slides (best viewed in Safari & Chrome).
If only all of these font providers all had APIs, we could pull them all into Drupal and use a standard interface to apply a wide variety of fonts to our designs without needing to hunt down who offers which fonts and deal with the a slightly different system at every provider. That's the idea behind @font-your-face: a common interface for dealing with fonts from all over the web in Drupal.
Hi there, talented web developers and designers. You should come work with us; we're hiring and you'll love it here.
