Good Drupal theming and skinning is hard. Really hard. Why? Often, the hard work of making a site smooth for visitors and managers is punted onto a designer who's used to working with pure HTML and CSS. In a system as flexible as Drupal, though, that's only one piece of the puzzle.

Front End Drupal is a book the Drupal world has needed for years, and its arrival is an indication of the software and the community's maturing. Rather than focusing exclusively on 'theming' (the process of skinning and customizing Drupal's HTML output), it covers an impressive range of topics needed to build the user-facing portions of a site.

Converting an existing Joomla! or Wordpress design to Drupal? There's an awesome 'cheat sheet' to help translate. Using jQuery in Drupal? Three chapters cover learning and using the library. Planning your site's structure? Covered. Building an administrative dashboard for editors? A full treatment of that topic alone could fill an entire book, but Front End Drupal gives readers a great overview and points them in the direction of useful tools that can get a lot of the work done for them. It even provides guidance for "front end" folks who need to dig into code to tweak tangly Drupal content like input forms.

The breadth of the book means that individual topics aren't always covered in depth -- if you need to start cranking out serious Drupal code or translating complex designs into HTML, for example, you'll need to dig deeper with other references. Most people making their way through these challenges, though, need a guide to the pieces and how they fit together before they can absorb the details.

For far too long, there's been no single place where these different disciplines -- the "Front end" part of building a Drupal site -- were treated as parts of a cohesive whole. With the release of Emma and Konstantin's book, that's changed: it's exactly what Front End Drupal provides.

Grungy, hand-lettered type has been with us for a long time. About a decade ago, I did all the headlines and callouts for my blog with a Bic pen -- I thought the look was super cool. That look gets pretty old, though; not many sites should look like a fifteen year old's angsty poetry journal.

More recently, the awesome opening sequence for the movie Juno put the spotlight on a growing trend towards scratchy, hand-lettered fonts that look like actual typefaces, rather than chicken-scratches. This look will probably be cliche soon enough, too, but in the meantime I've been hunting around for fun hand-lettered fonts that actually look like type. Naturally, they're all free...  Continue reading...

I got my start as a "computer professional" in the world of desktop publishing, not computer programming. When I was younger, I wrote and I made a zine and (naturally) as I learned a bit more about the rules of design, I tried to pick up work doing heavy labor in Pagemaker, Quark, and Illustrator.

I spent several years working for a small marketing company, doing basic design and layout work, writing copy for clients who had a business but didn't know how to describe it, and -- eventually -- tinkering with HTML when the company tried to take the plunge into New Media in the mid 90s. A decade of crazy twists and turns later, I'm a straight-up software developer who's years removed from any real design work. I never stopped loving good type, though.

I'll never claim to be a typographer... Maybe a type aficionado? In any case, I think every once in a while I'll be posting one of my favorite faces here, just because. Tonight, it's Bodoni. It's always seemed very dignified to me: classy and direct without being stuffy. What do you think?