Drupal for Designers: The Context You Need Without the Jargon You Don't

by Dani Nordin

Overview

Are you a solo web designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal? This hands-on book provides the tools and techniques to get you going. Award-winning designer Dani Nordin guides you through site planning, teaches you how to create solid, user-centered design for the Drupal framework, and shows you tricks for using real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick.

This book is a compilation of three short guides—Planning Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers—plus exclusive "director’s material." If you’re familiar with HTML and CSS, but struggling with Drupal’s learning curve, this is the book you’ve been looking for.

• Get extra material, including an expanded Grids chapter, more recommended modules, and a Short Form Project plan
• Learn how to work user-centered design practices into Drupal projects
• Choose the right modules for your project, and discover several go-to modules
• Use strategies for sketching, wireframing, and designing effective layouts
• Manage Drupal’s markup, including code generated by the powerful Views module
• Learn how to work with Drupal on the command line
• Set up your development environment and collaborate with other designers and developers
• Learn the basics of Git, the free open source version control system

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449325046
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/02/2012
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dani Nordin is the founder of the zen kitchen, an independent user experience design and research practice focused on helping forward-thinking organizations and development shops create great things in Drupal. Her background runs the gamut from print design and branding to layout, site planning and user experience for the web, with a specialty in interaction design for content-heavy Drupal implementations. She has been an active member of Boston's Drupal community since 2008.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Some Things to Remember About Working with Drupal
• Discovery and User Experience
  • Chapter 2: Setting the Stage—Discovery and User Experience
  • Chapter 3: User Experience—Techniques for Drupal
  • Chapter 4: Putting It in Practice—A Short-Form Project Brief
• Sketching, Visual Design, and Layout
  • Chapter 5: Sketch Many, Show One
  • Chapter 6: Working with Layout Grids
  • Chapter 7: Putting It in Practice—Setting Up Fireworks Templates for Drupal
• Setting Up a Local Development Environment
  • Chapter 8: The Drupal Designer’s Coding Toolkit
  • Chapter 9: Installing Drush
  • Chapter 10: Getting Started with Git
  • Chapter 11: Putting It in Practice—Setting Up a Local Development Environment and Installing Drupal
• Prototyping in Drupal
  • Chapter 12: Prototyping in Drupal
  • Chapter 13: Choosing Modules
  • Chapter 14: Making Views Sing—Using Views to Enhance a Layout
  • Chapter 15: Making Views Sing—Controlling Views Markup
  • Chapter 16: Getting Started with Drupal Theming: Base and Child Themes
  • Chapter 17: Making CSS Easier with LESS
• Making It Easier to Start Projects
  • Chapter 18: Using Features
  • Chapter 19: Working with Drush Make and Installation Profiles
• Working with Clients
  • Chapter 20: Proposing and Estimating Projects
  • Chapter 21: Getting Clients to Love You, Even When You Have to Tell Them “No”
  • Chapter 22: After the Handoff—The Project Retrospective
• Sample Documents
  • Project Brief
  • Work Agreement (with Professional Relationship Clause)
  • Project Proposal
• Colophon