My Drupal Blog

Basically, if you really want to be simplistic about it, Drupal theme design can be split into two clear stages – the design and the build.

The design is the bit where all the creative stuff happens. It’s the ideas stage, the point of questions which start ‘I wonder…’, and ‘hang on a second, what about…’. This is the place where Photoshop becomes my new best friend, and I try to pull everything together into one pretty picture. I like this stage a lot.

The build is the bit where I take the pretty picture and turn into a real live web page/site. This is the stage where I put on my code-monkey hat. It’s also the point at which I wish for some freak occurrence whereby I wake up tomorrow and IE6 no longer exists ;) I like this stage as well, although maybe not quite as much as the design bit, but it’s marginal.

Ideally, I think that these two stages should be completed in this order – design first, build second. After all, would an architect build a house without a complete design? Unlikely. So why should the virtual world design and build theory be any different from the real? Yes, it is true that the problems one may encounter, and the penalties one may pay, by jumping the gun in the virtual world are probably less severe than in the real world, but it’s still wasted time, and time is a precious commodity for any designer.