Todd Toler — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:08:35 GMT

Perhaps it’s because I design for a publisher, but our content types for a new project are brainstormed, designed, and specified fairly early in the design process. Where we fall over is in two primary areas. 1) we rarely examine the legacy content which is to be migrated to the new project closely enough. In fact the IAs mostly look at a couple of representative “edge cases,” then find we need to make all sorts of concessions in our approved designs to accommodate the full set of real content. But this is mostly on purpose – we want to design the experience first and maintain optimism that our existing content and production workflows can support it. God help us the day we start doing it the other way around. 2) we often find that our design mock-ups are too full of high quality art and layouts, and the production staff who needs to maintain the site often doesn’t have access to the same art direction resources on an ongoing basis.

Todd Toler — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:49:51 GMT

Russ & Leisa, thanks for this interview. Very interesting to hear about the emphasis on user experience within the Drupal admin and authoring environment. I feel Drupal and Wordpress are at the heart of a major shift in digital publishing and it’s hard to imagine a more important or noble place for a designer to work these days.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Todd Toler