Notes of a Drupal Designer

inShare When building a custom UI design for some CMS, it’s important that to follow designing functions offered by this CMS. Specifically, design mockups have to be a good representation of your CMS functionality. Though seeming like an obvious approach, this practice is often overlooked if a designer is not quite familiar with technologies behind his CMS. Mind implied functionality During the design building, design elements such as buttons or form fields imply some functionality, for instance, the sign-up form for an email newsletter. When the client reviews the design, he immediately assumes that functions conveyed in this design will be present on his website after the launch. Such an implied functionality may plant some seed for expectations which are not eventually fulfilled by the development team at the time of the website release. Remember your technical debt Furthermore, among the hidden costs an uninformed designer on Drupal carries is his technical debt. The greatest value-adds of using some open source code is that it is already written. The major primary goal of using such code is to reduce the customization amount to a minimum. Drupal technical debt appears when some large amount of theme/module creation and customization interferes with the ability of seamless upgrade from some current Drupal version to the next one. Leveraging the contributed module code as much as possible enables keeping your website’s code maintainable from version to version. In conclusion, while the main principle of modern design is “form follows function”, typically you system’s interface is the most successful if it satisfies it’s intended functions. If you’ve chosen the Drupal technology for building your website, we are ready to offer you our professional Drupal theme development services to make your site look good.