Design 4 Drupal: a movement takes off

At DrupalCon DC 2009, an unexpected event happened. While sessions centered on development, writing code, performance, businesses and the community were happening up front, the community of Drupal designers and themers were connecting behind the scenes like never before. It started over Twitter and in small Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and ended with the designers and themers taking over a room for the last two days of DrupalCon.

In that room, tucked away in the back, some dreaming happened. The designers and themers talked about features they would like in Drupal 7, techniques for theming, the lack of designers in Drupal, and much, much more. Angie Byron (webchick) took the time to pick their brains, plans were made to keep up the energy of change, and people started to connect with each other.

The Design 4 Drupal Group

One of the last tasks for this group was to create a group on groups.drupal.org where this new movement could keep going. That's when the Design 4 Drupal (or D4D) group started.

In the early weeks of the group, a #drupal-design channel was created on IRC and designers and themers were taught how to use it. A videocast was put together to teach designers about CVS (a constant barrier to entry for posting themes to drupal.org). A new "needs design review" tag was also added to Drupal issues.

The Design 4 Drupal Camps

The energy of the group started to turn to Drupal design camps. The first camp with a major design and theme presence was the recent DrupalCamp Copenhagen, where a third of the camp was dedicated to theming.

The next camp is the first camp entirely dedicated to design. This is the Drupal Design Camp Boston coming up on June 13-14 and is taking place at the Stata Center on the MIT campus, which is known not only for its bold and whimsical architecture (and that it's home to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), CSAIL and other prestigious labs and organizations) but that it was the location of the successful DrupalCon Boston 2008 code sprint.

This camp also coincides with the drupal.org redesign sprint at the MIT Media Lab on Friday, June 12. The sprint picks up where the San Francisco redesign sprint left off and participants at the Boston sprint will be learning how to contribute to theming drupal.org as well as implement the redesign.

Thanks to generous sponsors and help from individual contributors, Drupal Design Camp Boston is a free event. It is, however, organized entirely by volunteers and there are costs involved in running the conference. Sponsorships are immensely appreciated and all contributions go directly towards funding conference operation costs and any funds not used for the camp will donated to the the Drupal Association for other events and infrastructure, promotion and distribution needs.