This site is archived.

Communicating Drupal visually

let's make stuff
Introducing Drupal

Presenter:

Additional Presenters:  Stella Power

Track

Introducing Drupal

Experience

Beginner | Intermediate | Expert

Focus

Curious | Designer | Themer

Communicating Drupal visually

Day:  Wednesday, 25. august 2010
Time:  10:00-10:50
45 minutes (+15 minutes Q&A)

Room:

tags

planning | adoption | business | Training | documentation | education | learning | communication | presentation | help

Session goal: The goal of this session is to create informative visuals to assist in Drupal adoption.

Introduction: There is a presentation renaissance happening, and people are leaving the old tired bullet points behind. But there is a lack of useful visuals for Drupal. If you write documentation for your modules; if you present proposals to potential clients; if you deliver training, you find you need compelling visuals for your ideas.

In this session, you will learn principles for designing graphics which can help explain complex processes and abstract concepts. First you'll hear about the concepts and guidelines; then you'll try them out first hand. As a bonus, we'll be creating useful contributions for the Drupal community. Doing is the best way to learn.

Visuals for Drupal

New users of Drupal find it opaque and they use metaphors of mountains, walls and chaotic messes to describe Drupal. We'll offer instead useful visual alternatives to these metaphors. The visuals resulting from this workshop can then be used to help augment Drupal documentation, to assist in presentations at local Drupal User Groups, Camps as open educational resources. The visuals will help communicate fundamental architectures, best practices and concepts underlying Drupal.

In this workshop we will:

  • Learn guidelines for creating graphics for communicating abstract ideas
  • Familiarize ourselves with existing visual language and techniques
  • Practice and test strategies to match approach to the content for the chosen audience
  • Look at great examples of graphics for learning
  • Review the main conceptual stumbling blocks which mark Drupal as significantly different from other systems
  • Make stuff!

What to bring We'll be using colored paper, scissors, glue, pencils, markers. Bring your own stuff if you have something you want to be creative with. We can also use digital tools too. We're going to tackle fundamental concepts and misconceptions about Drupal. So bring your questions and confusion too.

All levels of expertise are welcome. This session is open especially both for those who are very knowledgeable about Drupal, and also to those who are new to Drupal. Ideally we will put people in mixed groups, and through dialog help communicate the ideas to new users. It would be great to have a mix!

Image (cc) Color Pencils by scui3asteveo

Resources