Impress me... Please!!

Posted by worldview on October 23, 2006 at 2:19pm

I am new to Drupal and it was recommended to me as a great way to build websites with simple and effective content management systems that can be customised for different graphics. But as a graphic designer who is experienced mainly in print design - and who is struggling to get my head around the technical complexities of designing for the web - I have not yet seen anything yet created with Drupal that impresses me at all.

Granted, Drupal offers a multiplicity of functions that is mind-blowing and relatively easy to implement... which I guess impresses the tech-heads, but it just looks - and there is no nice way to say it - ordinary! Sadly, everything I have seen so far just looks clinical and sterile, and unfortunately whilst I have the creative expertise, I don't have the technical expertise required to raise the standard.

Can anyone show me something that will make me salivate and my heart miss a beat? I mean something that is not just good... but excellent. Good graphics is supposed to do that to you. What are your "Top 5" Grupal sites?

Maybe someone with the technical know-how might be willing to work with me to come up with something that really can be impressive... perhaps a collaborative effort? I am open to suggestions.

- Allan

Comments

Although i can't point you

Posted by desm0n on October 23, 2006 at 2:36pm

Although i can't point you to a site that will blow your mind i would like to comment a little bit if i may ?

Drupal is a platform that allows you to do the bells and whistles stuff behind the scene. It handles content very well and is modular and quite easy to adapt for any and pretty much all purpose. I think this is why people love it so much and its certainly why i support it like no other CMS platform.

The front end visuals are pretty much down to individuals to get right and this is likely to be more important, for the most part, to the end users than say the admin who is trying to make his own life a little easier. I guess what i'm saying is if you had a team, say a few content managers, a couple of admnis and a designer you could devote a huge amount more time to developing the frontend as well as the backend.

Drupal is weak on themes that have any substance due to most people being either so busy maintaining their site that designing it to look more and more attractive gets increasingly difficult or, and this is where i come in, limited artistic graphic capabilities. But please don't let either of these stop you as drupal is as, if not more, flexable than comparable systems.

I'm sure that others will jump in with some great worked examples of wow factor sites and from your design background, you would be able to produce some yourself. Imagination, creativity and above all knowledge would be needed but the system itself is more than capable of handling it.

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This one is cool

Posted by robertDouglass on October 23, 2006 at 2:41pm

http://www.leuvenspeelt.be/

- Robert Douglass

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Lullabot | My Drupal book | My Digg stories

my Drupal book | Twitter | Senior Drupal Advisor, Acquia | Advisor ICanLocalize

Sorry -- running a bit low

Posted by bonobo on October 23, 2006 at 2:43pm

Sorry -- running a bit low on energy this morning, so impressing anybody (with the possible exception of my dogs, who get pretty damn impressed when I pull a treat out of the jar) is a bit of a tall order.

I can, however, point you to some reading -- this is how I learned.

Good luck -- Drupal is a pretty amazing platform, and worth the time.

Cheers,

Bill

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Tools for Teachers

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http://www.funnymonkey.com
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Using Drupal in Education

Well why dont you have a

Posted by pan0s on October 23, 2006 at 3:13pm

Well why dont you have a look at the forum section Drupal showcase.....

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Some people say the glass is half-full while others say its half-empty....i say bottoms up.

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Greek Drupal Community

I find most of the sites

Posted by techczech on October 23, 2006 at 3:22pm

I find most of the sites Lullabot did very impressive - http://www.lullabot.com/work. But you will find more in http://www.drupalshowcase.com/ and http://www.drupalsites.net. My personal reference points on the power of Drupal are http://www.airamerica.com, http://www.theonion.net and http://www.mtv.co.uk.

____________________________
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http://dominiklukes.net
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CiviCRM site

Posted by pwolanin on October 23, 2006 at 5:26pm

I just happened to look at the CiviCRM site (a Drupal site), and they've done a really nice upgrade to their theme:

http://civicrm.org/

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Work: Acquia

ok

Posted by ontwerpwerk on October 23, 2006 at 6:13pm

Ok, my turn to try to impress...

On a more serious note, what does it take to impress you?

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I work for Ontwerpwerk

I would be impressed if

Posted by tmp on October 23, 2006 at 6:27pm

I would be impressed if Drupal had themes like http://demo.rockettheme.com/

port to Drupal

Posted by pwolanin on October 23, 2006 at 8:00pm

pick whichever you like and port it- see, for example:

http://www.blkmtn.org/how-to-play-with-Yahoo-GRID-CSS

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Work: Acquia

What impresses me?

Posted by worldview on October 23, 2006 at 11:02pm

OK, since posting my first message I have found this: http://digett.com/ which I believe is a Drupal site.

As far as other great sites go, this gets my heart racing:
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/157/157.css&page=0
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/194/194.css&page=0
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/192/192.css&page=0
http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/187/187.css&page=1

Basically all the Zen Garden stuff is good.

Whilst I can appreciate good design, and am capable of creating it on my own computer screen, I am constantly frustrated by my lack of technical knowledge to make it work on websites.

But the problem with all of the sites I have seen is that they lack a comprehensive menu system which allows the user to access any page on the site FROM any page on the site. If you take a look at the menu I have implemented at www.worldviewinteractive.com you will see what I mean (Internet Explorer only please!). This menu utilises a javascript menu system so that a lot of content can be accessed from anywhere. The only problem I have had with this is that for some reason it doesn't seem to display well in Mozilla and Netscape or on Mac broswers. But the question I have is this: Is it possible to implement a menu system like this with Drupal?

- Allan

shutting off the drupals navigation block

Posted by VM on October 23, 2006 at 11:13pm

yes. you can shut off the drupals menu, and roll your own. there are quite a few ways to do so theres a module for DHTML menus also on angrydoughnuts.com written by merlinofchaos whos also the developer of at least one major module for drupal.

you may also choose to show the drupal navigation menu on admin only pages, so that you when you log in for admin necessities its drupalish, and all references to any admin task remains fluid between you and the community in cases where you need assistance.

nothing worse then telling someone to go to adminster -> settings -> some setting

and be told, i dont have that menu, its not there and come to find the user has changed names on the menu or deleted it : )

Those menus can be easily

Posted by dvessel on October 23, 2006 at 11:24pm

Those menus can be easily implemented to work with Drupals internal menuing system. Well, not the one you've done specifically but a more compatible version like suckerfish. The menus are just unordered lists. Lots can be done with styles.

–joon

⎋ joon park

Drupal is not a design

Posted by eagereyes on October 23, 2006 at 11:28pm

All those CSSZenGarden themes should be easy enough to port, it's just that nobody seems to have bothered doing that yet. Drupal creates very decent XHTML, that you can style very well with CSS.

I think you're asking the wrong question. It's like saying: all the Diesel cars I see are so ugly, can you guys show me a well-designed Diesel car? Drupal is just the engine (haha, what a pun! ;) underneath, the design is almost 100% independent from it. Granted, most Drupal sites look alike, because people are lazy. But that's the same with many other CMSs.

I think you'd like Drupal's flexibility and power, and I don't think it's worse than any other CMS in how much support you get when designing for it (it's probably quite a bit better than many others).

EagerEyes.org

eagereyes.org

actaully

Posted by sepeck on October 23, 2006 at 11:38pm

Someone did write a theme / module setup to use the csszengarden stuff with almost no modifications. The problem with that is that csszengarden is a demo/example site and the images are all copyright of the submitter. That said all the linked themes are do-able in Drupal

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

nice-menus module, primary links, etc

Posted by glendac on November 1, 2006 at 5:55am

I've only been playing with Drupal for a little over two weeks now but you can achieve the menu system you implemented at www.worldviewinteractive using the contributed module Nice Menus. You use it with the links you want to be accessed from anywhere on your site and make sure those links are on all your page templates. You can try making Nice Menus work with the primary links block which come with most theme page templates.

As some of the respondents to this thread have already stated, interface design considerations have to work with basic Drupal concepts such as node, regions, and blocks. These very structures should work well with the concepts in building Cascading Style Sheets. Like most new Drupal users, I also get busy learning the functionalities (the modules) that it's easy to forget what the user experience might be with designs like those in the CSS Zen Garden. People with your graphic design background have a lot to contribute to the UXD aspect of the full Drupal experience. [You do need to start learning CSS...]

Yes, I agree. A lot of Drupal sites can start to look to boring blue. I've chosen a theme that's more lively (see http://softtester.org) and the best I was able to do to customize it was change the default banner and make simple changes with the page template for my book pages (comment out the left sidebar, that kind of stuff). I have no background at all in graphics and neither am I a programmer but I think there's a lot of room for CSS-Zen-Garden-like design with Drupal.

Some of ours sites

Posted by leobraga.com.br on October 23, 2006 at 9:22pm

www.casaronald.org.br and www.countryserv.com.br
There's a lot in the oven... :) we are loving drupal!!!!!

Wow

Posted by Michelle on October 23, 2006 at 9:40pm

The Ronald McDonald House on is pretty nice looking. I'm not a big fan of Flash for usability, but it does make for impressive eye candy. :) Doesn't look "Drupally" at all.

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

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_{Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.}

Well, designing for print is

Posted by dvessel on October 23, 2006 at 10:45pm

Well, designing for print is nothing like designing for any CMS.

Drupal is a CMS but it's also a framework. You have to design modular chunks separately then let the server piece them together as it's being sent out to your users. This of course makes any attempt at a layout more difficult since it's not a trivial task in making sure all the pieces fit together properly. If you keep the design simple, obviously it becomes easier but if you spent any time designing for the web then you would understand how much harder it can be. -Internet Explorer being the main culprit

But the first thing you should understand is HTML & CSS. Once you master that, designing for Drupal can become very powerful since the templating system has very little limits.

Here's a redo of my site. Not finished but I thought I'd post. Might be impressive, might not. I'm trying though and it's nowhere near being done. It'll break in IE as usual... :p

–joon

⎋ joon park

:)

Posted by .carey on October 23, 2006 at 11:28pm

Now I am impressed!

Glad you think so. :)

Posted by dvessel on October 23, 2006 at 11:56pm

Glad you think so. :) Thanks!

–joon

⎋ joon park

StokBlogs

Posted by Theo on January 15, 2007 at 6:29am

Check out http://www.stokblogs.com. We use - and LOVE - Drupal for creating a community for stock pickers and their dynamic portfolios.

Unlimited FREE Job Posting
http://www.uberjobs.com

this one looks very

Posted by steveedwards on October 26, 2006 at 5:46pm

this one looks very nice
http://www.areyouhotter.com

All misunderstood

Posted by PettyRider on August 21, 2007 at 4:43pm

Drupal core outputs clean, mostly valid HTML, meaning there is nothing you can't do with CSS and JavaScript. If you don't like any of the default drupal styles, just don't print them out in your page template. Be warned though, you'll find yourself doing a lot of extra CSS work, especially for the backend. I've taken the reset approach, where I am slowly developing a new chunk of CSS rules that take care of most of the annoying things Drupal's default CSS does (like the bullets on link menus).

Trying to sum it up, to think that Drupal has anything to do with how the sites that run on it look is a complete misunderstanding of not only what Drupal does, but how the layers of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript blend to create the user's experience. There is no design that cannot be powered by Drupal (because there is no design that can't be achieved with CSS/JS/Flash)

I agree. Its not designing

Posted by Steven_NC on August 23, 2007 at 3:54am

I agree. Its not designing with Drupal that presents the problem (quirks aside), but designing what you want.

Determining what you want the site to do is the tough part. Get the modules you need, decide where and how you want things to appear and region/node template your way toward it. CSS can be done last. Pick a good starter theme like ZEN or liteJazz.

Zen Garden is a great site for ideas. Mix and match to get the site you want. Remember that the ZenGarden people styled exactly one page.

How about this one?

Posted by tomislav23 on August 25, 2007 at 2:17pm

Here's an awesome site with a great design -> http://www.hyboria.info/

I haven't been checking a lot of posts in the showcase forum but from what I've seen this site has the best design in my opinion. Of course it wouldn't fit any type of website but it doesn't matter. What matters is that the designer found a way to implement all of drupal's great features into a graphically rich theme with some great javascript menus.