Drupal Camp Victoria
This last Friday and Saturday we hosted 'Drupal Camp Victoria' which drew in a fairly good crowd. On Friday I did presentations on introduction to Drupal and "Themer Meet Developer" which went really well, despite being on crutches and T3's!!! I am going to post my themer meet developer notes here. OH, and beerfest was pretty fun... even though I was on crutches (thats me and Ariel in the pic at beerfest)
Topics:
Organization of the layer palette
- In sequential order
- No stray, uneeded layers
- Usage of layer sets and sub-layer sets
Naming Layers
- Name layer sets according to Drupal region
- Name layers something that make sense (Ie, "navigation bar")
Smart objects and vector shapes
- Benefits are that they are easy to change and update. Vector shapes are nice because you can quickly change the colors of things.
Outer glows and gradients
Document Dimensions
Link hover states
- Normal, Active, Hover
- Button hoverstates > normal/hover
Repeating backgrounds and patterns
Filetypes (ie, if you are supplying an illustrator file, make sure all linked layers are supplied!)
Fonts - fonts for body, fonts for headings and sifr
- Use websafe fonts for body text
- Use websafe fonts for headings wherever possible
- Include fonts in design package incase programmer needs to make quick changes.
- Dont rasterize your text incase the programmer needs to change it.
Pixel perfect (making sure there are no half-pixels floating around)
Random extras - favicons, extra buttons (ie, for multilingual site)
Why a programmer should get a good design file:
* Time. Getting a proper file will speed you up significantly.
* It's easier for the designer to make changes to the file than it is for you.
