Matt Farina - Design

Leading In The Face of Criticism

matt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:37:09 +0000

How do you react when your pet project is criticized? How about when a project you use and love is criticized? When it's the same criticism you've heard over and over you and are tired of hearing it? That's happened yesterday to the Drupal Views project when a tweet sent out of frustration turned into a swarm of tweets, IRC conversations, and back room talk. For the most part, the situation could have been handled better by everyone involved.

What happened?

Let's just say quick reactions, emotions, and defense mechanisms ruled the day. In the end I don't think anyone was satisfied and I have yet to see anything constructive come to light. There was name calling, anger, people trying to defend themselves and others, and a mess of unproductively.

What We Can Do Better Next Time

This situation could have been handled much better. Instead of acting the way many did with passion, frustration, and emotion the criticism should or could have been molded into actionable tasks and ideas.

Here are a handful of things we can do that can help these situations:

Don't respond to your emotions. It may be hard to do. Sometimes I will walk away from the situation for hours or even a day before responding to something so I can do so with a clear head.
Turn the criticism into something constructive. This could be as simple as pointing someone to a place (like the issue queues) and asking them to describe the problem and what they see would be better. If you have more time it could be good to engage the conversation to see what they see.
Be a diplomat. For some reason the role of attaching and defending soldier comes so naturally. Instead, play the role of diplomat.
Ignore Them. Sometimes it's better to ignore criticism and move on than let it get to you. If it eats you up that can make you unhappy and can even cause health problems.

Critics Not Going To Stop

One of the responses I heard numers times was that critics need to act different. If we create something with any popularity it will have critics. They will be there no matter what we desire. And, the only people we can change are ourselves. So, asking them to go away or asking them to act differently just isn't going to get them to do it.

People Smarter Than Me

A while back there was a Google Tech Talk called "How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People" which touched on this subject. It's done by a couple guys who have lived and learned how to deal with these situations successfully. You can see the video below.

Disclaimer: This post isn't directed at anyone. I've learned a lot of these lessons the hard way and just want to share them in the spirit of community growth.

The Horror of Views Markup

matt — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:35:17 +0000

Every so often someone points to the markup generated by the Drupal Views modules and calls it ugly. This seems come up every so often in the forums, issue queues, blog posts, and on twitter. Most of the time this is where the conversation turns a bit ugly. Since this conversation has been had many times the people who are involved are a bit tired of explaining what's going on to someone new and to many Views is their baby and it was just called ugly. So, let me take a shot at explaining why Views markup is the way it is, why that's good for some, and what you can do about it if you don't like it.

The Deal With Views Markup

The markup from Views has to be very flexible out of the box. It's going to be used by a lot of people to do a lot of different things. So, the markup provides spans, divs, and classes for almost every case you'd want to style. If you are someone who lives in CSS and loves classes and separation of everything it's there for you. There is a certain group of designers that want this and they have been vocal and are, for the most part, happy with the markup.

Can't Make Everyone Happy

As the saying goes, you can't make everyone happy all the time. Having lots of spans, divs, classes and other forms of markup is directly opposed to small concise markup others love. You can't have both out of the box and what Views picked is actually easier for new people to pick up.

In Drupal to alter the output you need to know how the theming system works and how to override the default markup. Since Views provides lots of markup many people can learn to style the output without needing to know how to alter the markup output of views. It saves them from a layer of complexity.

Having Markup Your Way

If you are a markup purist and want to change the markup output by Views it's there for you to change. Views uses the templating system provided by Drupal and has a display plugin system of it's own. With the templating system you can override all of the markup provided by Views and replace it with your own. It's almost as simple as copying the Views template files into your theme and altering or replacing them.

Drupalcon Paris

As Morten does at the Drupalcons he attends, in Paris, there will be a session about overriding the default markup in Drupal to replace it with what you want. If you're not going to make it to Paris you can wait for the video from his session to be published or check out the video of his session from Drupalcon DC.

Drupalcamp Boston Wrap-up

matt — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:09:15 +0000

The Drupal Design Camp in Boston this past weekend was fantastic. Having the event at the MIT Stata Center, a building that looks like it's right our of a Dr. Seuss book, was a perfect place for a design event. With well over 150 people, loads of fantastic sessions, and ideas for improving the tools and community designers and themers have the camp was a roaring success.

Photo by Jeff Eaton. Everyone is pointing at Morten.

The People

There weren't just people attending from the east coast or midwest and Morten wasn't the person who traveled the furthest. There were people from Texas, the Bay Area, and Europe. From the looks of things the event was 1/4 women. Has there ever been a drupal event with this high percentage of women? There were new people and people with 2 digit drupal.org user ids. There were developers and there were a whole lot of people with the creative art gene.

The Sessions

More than one attendee said they thought the sessions here were better than at drupalcon. With keynotes by Jeff Robbins and Jay Batson and huge sessions like the one on the 960 grid by Nathan Smith, the creator of 960, and Todd Nienkerk it's hard not to feel this way.

The 40 session covered topics ranging from the basics of drupal to themeing techniques to radical new ideas in how to theme like skinr.

The New Ideas

In Jay Batson's keynote many of the back room chatter started to turn into things we can act on as a community. Some ideas that came out were to start a site for designers and themers, to have a way to deal with snippets (something themers seem to do well), to have a showcase of hot drupal sites (giving credit where due). These are just the tip of the ice berg.

The Stata Center

The Stata Center was the perfect place for an event like this. Every direction you look there's something inspiring and artistic about the building.

Photo by Michael Verdi

I want to give a special thanks to Susan MacPhee for organizing the event and MIT for hosting the event. It was fantastic.

An Overlooked Drupal Design Problem

matt — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:05:45 +0000

Most of the shared Drupal themes aren't very good and there aren't very many commercial ones. That's what a study shared by Jay Batson pointed out. Jay went on to propose some steps we could take to court better design in the Drupal community. While he made some important points, there is one important point that was overlooked. The issue of crediting designers for their work.

Hostile Land For Designers

Let's be honest. The Drupal community is a hostile land for designers. Drupal.org is nothing to look at (yes, I know that's changing). The drupal web tools, like api.drupal.org, are centered on developers. To contribute a theme you have to know and use CVS. At drupalcon dc designers and themers had to take over BoF rooms to get the space they need.

The Drupal community is anything but warm and inviting to designers. We tend to treat designers like we do fellow developers. We can't do that. They are different. It would be like buying my wife a vacuum for her birthday. Just a bad idea.

Crediting Developers

Right now drupal developers are credited in a variety of ways. If they contribute code there are commit messages. We even keep stats on that. Their contributed modules are tracked on their user pages and you can see how many sites are using their modules. If they contribute to core their usernames are in the commit messages and can get up on the big screen at drupalcon.

If you are lucky enough (is lucky the right word) you can get your name in the MAINTAINERS.txt file for Drupal so everyone can see your name on the project.

As you contribute you build up community cred with the other developers. You make friends. You gain influence.

Difference Between Design and Development

When a developer writes a sweet module, like Views, for a site they can share it back with the community for fame, reputation, and more. The case is quite different for a designer.

If a themer contributes back a base theme like zen, blueprint, or moshpit it's a reusable piece of code like a module. A full design is something you can't share back from a project. If I share a design from a site I've done and people use it my branding status is lowered. It hurts the effectiveness of a site.

So, designs typically can't be contributed back in the same way modules or base themes can be.

Difference between Designers and Drupal Developers

Drupal developers usually want to move up the Drupal Developer food chain. When they contribute back there is an ecosystem of Drupal developers for them to interact with.

This is not the case for designers. There is no flourishing design community. When they go to interact within the design world they do it with the design world at large. Designers aren't interested in having their name in a drupal commit message about a change in the code. They are interested in receiving credit for the design they worked on. Note, a design is different than a theme in this case.

One of the things the Drupal community needs to figure out is how to credit designers for their designs in a way that showcases it the larger design community. This is especially important for drupal core where the drupal 7 version has just 2 designs.

So, this is a call for ideas. How can we do this and do it in an effective way for the design community?

I want to give a special thanks to Leisa Reichelt and Morten for helping me understand this.

Why Inline Editing In Drupal Is Hard

matt — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:12:06 +0000

Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have suggest drupal provide inline editing in the interface. This is a fantastic idea and one I would love to see in drupal. But, (I hate this part) inline editing in drupal is a difficult feature to add. So, before everyone wonders whey we don't offer it or why it's going to take some work let's look at why this is hard.

An example

I think a good way to see some of the problems in action is to look an example of what would happen. For example, let's look at the process of editing the body of a page inline.

A user clicks on something to convert the body as displayed into a field to edit.
The page calls back to drupal to get the content of this field as someone would edit it. The content drupal displays goes through a filter system before it's displayed. This cleans out XSS and other security measures and lets other drupal modules plug-in to alter content too. An example of this altering is Filtered HTML which strips out unwanted tags.
A user updates this text and submits it.
This updated text needs to go back to the server, run through the filters, and returned to the page for display.

We might think this is where the fun stops. But, it doesn't. Many of the fields displayed by drupal are computed fields. A simple example of that is the teaser for the body text. In many cases this is computed by a number of conditions. How will this be handled? How will other computed fields be handled in updating the live page?

Not The First Time

This is not the first time someone has tried to add inline editing into drupal. Some, like Steven Wittens, have tried to do it in the past. This is a difficult problem to solve and is a product of drupals loved and utilized power.

Let's Figure It Out

I think we should try to figure it out. I love the idea. It means we have to make decisions and changes will touch some complex code. But, I think understanding a problem is a good place to start solving it. So, who wants to start rolling this patch?

Update: This post is based on a conversation in #drupal between leisa, chx, myself, and others.

Bringing Design To Drupal

matt — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:54:52 +0000

A new movement surfaced at drupalcon DC. It had been bubbling under the surface for some time and it came to a head when 1400 drupalers came together for a week. That movement is Design for Drupal or d4d.

Let's be honest. Drupal isn't pretty out of the box. It's known for it's functionality and community not it's design. An article comparing Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal put it perfectly when it said,

...Drupal also has the problem that it just doesn't always look that great. I have seen very few websites built in Drupal that look and feel as good as they function. You can especially see this in the theme directory on the Drupal.org website, where there are dozens of these themes built to prove the exact point I just made. It's a shame really, because with all of the development advancements the software has, it would almost be perfect with a stronger usability and design interface.

In the past week I've gotten an opportunity to listen in on the parking lot conversations of the designers and see their desire to contribute to something better. Something that can help us all.

At drupalcon there was an obvious need for more design. The lack of design tracks caused the designers and themers to take over a BoF room all day Friday and get some room for Saturday. Some twitter chatter about the lack of design sessions caused a BoF session asking how we can get more designers involved in drupal (the audio from that is available at http://blip.tv/file/1848508).

On Saturday, designers and themers came together to talk about the state of design in drupal and look to where they can help take it. The session started out with an introduction by everyone present as to who they are and what they are looking for. Below is a video of that and the audio is available at http://blip.tv/file/1866277

This was followed by some great brainstorming sessions, creating a strategy where we would go from here, and some time with core committer Angie Byron where designers and themers shared their view of the world with her.

From here a group of designers, themers, and developers (like myself) have gotten together to help make this happen. There is a group at http://groups.drupal.org/d4d that has been quickly growing. There is an IRC room at #drupal-design on Freenode. There is a twitter hash tag at #drupaldesign. There is a 'needs design review' tag for drupal patches. And, most importantly there is organization, desire, goals, and drive taking form.

If you are interested in helping or just cheering on the effort please stop by the group, hit us up in IRC, or raise your hand in any way you can. We want to work with everyone. The developers have build a rock solid platform to build amazing sites. Now, let's see what the designers can do with it.

Building A Community Of Drupal Designers

matt — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:07:44 +0000

Have you ever wondered where all the drupal designers are? It's easy to find a drupal coder. Drupal is full of coders doing some great things. But, designers are a lot harder to find and are a much rarer species. I would go so far as to call them an endangered species. So, what can we do get them off the endangered species list?

At Drupalcon DC we held a Birds of a Feather session to ask just this question. Just about everyone in the room was a designer. Below is most of the audio... but, be warned that is was recorded on the fly and my battery went dead with about a minute of conversation left.

Click To Play

This leaves me wondering where the designers go next? A first step is that there will be a room for them all day on Friday (Rm. 156) and Saturday at Drupalcon DC. Beyond that I hope those in the rooms can get a bright future started.

Drupal Case Study: GeeksandGod.com

matt — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:55:44 +0000

Last week, Bob and I launched a new look Geeks and God podcast and community site. When we had first launched the site two years ago, under drupal 4.7, it was a basic site where page nodes were our podcast and we used an outside software like feeder and feedburner to generate our feeds. Since then a community has grown around the podcast, the technology has come a long way, and the dynamic around the site has changed. To embrace this we rebuilt the site, added new features, and re-constructed our data model (we have a data model for the first time).

In Episode 102 of the podcast we walk through many of the technical changes, the modules we used, how and why we built what we built and more.

How do we make drupal more designer friendly?

matt — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:25:00 +0000

Drupal is a great development environment. And, when it comes to creating themes, you don't have to be a php whiz to create them either. There are even efforts to make theming easier with each new release. So, why aren't designers coming to drupal in hordes? Better yet, how do we make drupal more designer friendly?

These two questions go hand in hand. We need to understand why we don't have more designers to know where the weak points are. I highly suspect the weak points aren't just in the drupal code but in the drupal community. I don't think designers are nearly as much concerned with the code as developers.

While, there have been some great efforts but drupal folks like Steven Wittens with his talk Designer Eye for the Geek Guy/Gal there is still a lot of room for improvement. That presentation seemed to be turning geeks into designers. What about turning those artsy designers into drupalers?

Any thoughts, observations, or specks of wisdom floating out there in the ether? Any artsy designers see something you'd care to share?

Answers In Genesis Website New Look

matt — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:16:42 +0000

Answersingenesis.org just released a new, cutting edge, web 2.0 look.

The Cool

Answers in Genesis regularly updates their sites to stay on the cutting edge and this update delivers. The look is very web 2.0, has lots of white space, gradients galore, and all around looks good. In this update the website incorporates jquery, a popular javascript library, to make it more usable and add some cool effects.

The Good

Answers in Genesis is known for their quality, smart, and well thought out content. The new look doesn't take away from that. In fact, the new look makes finding the content even easier. Two examples are the more predominant menu and the search box right up front and easy to find.

The Bad

With even the best sites there are bound to be negatives and this site is no different. If you are someone who is interested in standards compliant quality code don't look at the source for this website. It isn't pretty and can make a standards nut go a little crazy.

Overall Impression

Even with the ugly code, this site delivers on the user experience. This update keeps the site on the cutting edge of website design; while, increasing users ease to find what they are looking for.