The best theme for artist portfolio site?

I know that's quite a huge task to ask someone to do that has little Drupal/HTML/CSS experience. But for an artist portfolio website, something original and pretty would be the best way to go about it. The reason why I say this is because there aren't very many artistic theme developers in the Drupal community. Drupal is great framework for programmers and web developers, so these developers are the ones that come to Drupal and write code. There's a lack of designers to build themes in the community.. And it sucks because many people looking for a cms will look at Joomla or Wordpress simply because they are prettier than Drupal. Also, another issue about theme development is that everyone wants a theme that does what the user wants it to do. Since everyone has different needs for their website, the theme developer often gets requests to change the core theme to something that suits that specific users needs. That gets very annoying (believe me).

So best case scenario, you grab a free CSS based template somewhere online, and customize the zen theme to use look like that free CSS template you got.

As far as modules go, the Image module is simple and does what you need it to do. Plus it has a gallery option.

Sorry I couldn't be more help, but there has always been a lack of pretty themes in Drupal. Roll your own theme that reflects your needs, what you're doing, and best represents you as an artist.

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Jason

If you don't want (or don't know how to) to create your unique Drupal theme, you could try to use Zen theme (live Demo of Zen Theme), as you start point for modifications.

From Zen Theme

Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal 5. If you are building your own standards-compliant theme, you will find it much easier to start with Zen than to start with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has LOTs of documentation in the form of code comments for both the PHP (template.php) and HTML (page.tpl.php, node.tpl.php).

The idea behind the Zen theme is to have a very flexible standards-compliant and (relatively) semantically correct XHTML theme that can be highly modified through CSS.

Some of options for gallery:
- http://drupal.org/node/144725 (HowTo: Create an image gallery using only CCK and Views)
- http://drupal.org/project/image (Drupal Image Module - image_gallery.module : using taxonomy terms, organize and display your uploaded pictures in galleries)
- http://drupal.org/project/gallery (Drupal Gallery Module - integration with menalto gallery)

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Drupal Theme Garden
Drupal Hosting Article

Vision Media posted here recently yet no one commented on their very pretty Drupal layout design work. Anyway. Their site shows a special Artists portfolio service, and it seems reasonably priced too, though I'm not sure it's Drupal,

http://www.vision-media.ca/portfolio

FYI, Zen Theme fails to load properly in the Opera Browser. Contect me for a screenshot.

Toby

I would go with one that has a layout similar to what you want, for example, if you want a horizontal menu and right sidebar, I would find the simplest theme that had these characteristics and work from there. Don't worry about it not being original, I made this site... http://drupal5.glyphnet.com off of ...well I can't remember which theme, I renamed it my theme, but I used a simple shipped theme as the base, but you would never know. So just go with something that is similar to what you want and redecorate.

As far as your pictures go try the Gallery2 module. You have to get Gallery2 and its kinda a long process to implement, but it works

Hope this helps

Kacie