I'm building a community blog/magazine website and I'm having a tough time finding the right designer

I've posted job listings and scoured the "Drupal Showcase" as well as www.Drupalsites.org. So far, the results aren't fantastic. I can only say that www.lime.com is the best Drupal site I've ever seen, and www.cre8d-design.com is the most famous Drupal-friendly designer I know.

Is there a list of Drupal designer superstars? Who are your favorite Drupal-friendly designers?

Your help is much appreciated.

Comments

Lullabot

The Lullabot team and particularly Ted Serbinski seem to have a good grasp of theming. They are even offering Drupal Theming Workshops.

look at the existing themes

http://drupal.org/project/Themes
if anybody of the theme designer's impresses you then contact them
the created the themes on a 0 budget, I am sure with enough money they can do wonders

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world experts tag cloud

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Are you asking about Drupal design (architecture, implementation of a site) or theme design? Because those can be different skill sets. Also, there are more people that can probably take a theme design and implement it in Drupal then people who can design a theme AND implement it in Drupal. For instance, the theme for http://www.twit.tv/ wasn't designed by a Drupal designer, but the site and implementation of the theme itself was (Lullabot).

I believe Bryght and Rain City Studios should be mentioned as other companies with a lot of experience in the area as well.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

Thanks for the great suggestions

Lullabot and Rain City both look like great design firms. Rain City seems to have a bit more blog experience, so that gives them the edge a bit.

To answer your question Steven, we are looking for someone who can design a theme AND implement it into Drupal.

With regards to the templates, there are a lot of nice ones out there, so I will definitely check them out. Thanks everyone!

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Experienced Themers

I like the work of

http://www.bryght.com,
http://www.raincitystudios.com
http://www.lullabot.com
http://www.imagexmedia.com

We also have caught up on themeing fast and now have a focused theme development division.
http://www.cogdina.com

Gaurav
http://www.bpocanada.com

--
Roshan Shah
T : 604-630-4292
Vancouver, Canada
Skype/GoogleTalk/Yahoo : bpocanada

*Blush*

Gaurav, thank you for the mention. At ImageX Media we strive to balance the priority of design and development. It is always nice to see validation that we're on the right track. When we first started working with Drupal 3 years ago it had a poor reputation in design circles. While this is still an issue, things have really improved over time. Here are a more few peers that have excellent design skills:

http://developmentseed.org
http://www.donatgroup.com
http://www.digett.com

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Rick Vugteveen | ImageX Media (work) | Blog (personal)

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Rick Vugteveen |rickvug.com @rickvug on Twitter

Hi! Although new to Drupal,

Hi! Although new to Drupal, I have done quite a bit of themeing for it and can now safely say that there is nothing impossible with Drupal. I am sorry I can't contribute my Drupal theme to the community, just yet, or having a working version ready somewhere; this is coz' the site has been developed as an organization's intranet and they weren't too happy with the thought of having the theme available to an entire community. However, I have uploaded screenshots of my theme for Drupal on my blog. Do have a look, and I hope I make the cut :-).

Any more recommendations?

I'm looking for a few more expert Drupal theme designers to get a sense of what/who's out there. Thanks.

Drupal developers and designers

These guys are good. They posted one of the best ecommerce sites I've seen using Drupal/ubercart. sprocketcreative.com. The site they just did is: cornerstonecookiegifts.com. I saw someone commment on that site through this blog.

drupal designers

I've had trouble finding quality drupal programmers/ designers. For lack of a better place to post this, I wanted to put my 2 cents in about Rain City Studios. www.raincitystudios.com

They were recommended to me, I went with them, they recommended that I move to their Bryght servers, I did that. They successfully completed about 1/2 of the contract, decided they wanted to get out of the hosting business, moved my site to a new server co. (which they recommended), in the process they broke event registration (4 weeks before my big annual event), purchasing membership, video playback, the membership directory, the contact form, and I'm sure there were other things I'm forgetting now. They got purchasing membership back up in a few days as well as video, the rest remains broken, and the other 1/2 of the contract I paid for is still unfinished. They stopped returning emails almost 3 months ago, they broke the modules listed above about 3.5 months ago. I even emailed the CEO (Robert?) of the company who assured me that there would be quick action, and it never happened.

I'm sure they're not like this with everyone, but this was probably the worst experience I've had with a company (and I've experienced my fair share).

Eyenox Media Drupal designer

Hey there,

You can have a look at our website Eyenox Media.
We do drupal design and implementation, http://www.eyenoxmedia.nl/portfolio/drupal-implementatie

And jugde yourself about our quality, interested to know what you think about it.

Greets

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Robin Klein Schiphorst
Eyenox Media
I'm a freelance webdesigner and interaction designer.

The problem with most Drupal providers is that they are weak on design. And design is not the same as theming, which specifically refers to the translation of the design to a Drupal theme.

Creative Stride (http://creativestride.com) is an exceptional design agency that I have repeatedly used for Drupal custom development. The most impressive part has been their ability to provide high-end design services along with technical competence. They are not cheap, however. But all good things must come at a cost.

Not to toot my own horn but, well, yeah, I willl...

I've been a designer for 20 years, the last 15 of which were spent mostly designing web sites. I owned my own successful design firm from 1995 to 2003. I joined pingVision as lead designer in 2007, and worked there until August of 2008, at which time I started my own company, again, which is what I do now. I've been working pretty exclusively with Drupal for almost four years now, and headed up theming, design, and user interface for some big drupal projects in that time, including the Knight Foundation-funded project, Printcasting, and now FeedBrewer and BookBrewer, where I am the COO and Creative Director.

I'm looking for 10-20 hours per week of work on big and/or fun projects to supplement my income as we go into alpha on BookBrewer. If anyone is interested, please check out some of my work. Been a bit too busy to keep the portfolio up-to-date, but you should get a good sense of my work by looking at the following Drupal sites:

http://www.terracreative.com
http://www.donhajicek.com
http://www.bookbrewer.com
http://www.printcasting.com
http://www.feedbrewer.com
http://www.cjbox.net

In 2008, my Drupal design/theming work won two Horizon Interactive awards, for what that's worth.

Thanks for listening! :)

Don

Don Hajicek
COO & Creative Director. FeedBrewer, Inc.

good design and drupal

Hello, we at Fountain City Productions are in love with Drupal, and also with top-design. You might like some of our work: http://fountain-city.com

Merging Technology with Creativity
Fountain City Productions
http://fountain-city.com

Hi, If your still looking

Hi,

If your still looking for some good designs we would love to help you out over at Ideas by Nature.

www.ideasbynature.com

Thanks,
Chris

Ideas by Nature
www.ideasbynature.com

another solution

check out portable design
http://www.portable-design.com

regards,
Adrian
portable-design

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