The Design Initiative has three main goals - build a new core theme, build a new collaboration site for designers, and community outreach. The new core theme initiative is well under way and we're tantalizingly close to design.drupal.org becoming a reality. What we need to do now is step up a gear and start thinking about outreach.
The undeniable focus of outreach is to get more designers involved with Drupal. Designers find it hard to know where to start in Drupal - how to get involved, what can they work on, where can they make a difference. I think we can make this a lot easier - with Design Challenges.
What is a Design Challenge?
Simple - anything that needs designing can be a design challenge. Lets throw a few ideas out there:
- Design our new core theme
- Design some banners for the Drupal Association
- New Drupal branding material
- UX/UI issues that need design work
- Solve accessibility issues
- Icon sets for Drupal themes
- Drupal tshirts, stickers, or other merchandise
- Drupalcon or Drupal camp theme designs
- and more..
How could this work?
It could work like this:
- Users post a "Challenge nomination" - basically an outline of the requirements, constraints, deadline and so on.
- Users can comment and vote on these nominations.
- Challenges that are popular/good/needed become full Challenges.
- Designers can then take up the challenge and start posting designs.
- The Challenger (whoever posted the challenge) chooses the design they want to use.
Lets take an example. The Drupal Association needs some new banners to advertise something. They post a challenge nomination - clearly this is something that is needed, so it gets promoted to a full Challenge. Designers can then start discussing this, posting sketches and comps etc, even collaborating by posting layered files and sharing the work load. The DA gets involved in the process via comments/discussion and ultimately chooses the banners they think are most suitable, and the challenge is complete.
For those of you in the know this is very similar to what Mozilla have been doing for ages with their Creative Collective, posting all sorts of cool design challenges and getting lots of people involved in what they call a "worldwide community of open source designers". Mozilla extended the original idea with Personas and tshirt designs both of which have been outrageously successful.
I really hope the community backs this idea, we sorely need easier ways for designers to get involved in the Drupal community and I can see this blossoming into something truly awesome. Love to hear your ideas and feedback.