The design is meant to look like the cover of a board game box and accompanies the web site's design.

I finished designing and building this year's edition of LeuvenSpeelt.be, a site that promotes student theater at my old university. You can read about the background in my previous blog posts.

The site is a simple Drupal installation with heavy content and theme work. The design is heavy on graphics and built as an experimental semi-fluid layout that adapts to different screen resolutions. Peripheral design elements are shifted in or out of the browser frame to make more space for content as needed.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, TextMate. Uses the beautiful Fontin font available freely from Jos Buivenga's exljbris foundry.

And no, no easter eggs this year.

I did my OSCMS talk Designer eye for the geek guy today. My main plan for this talk was to blast as much basic graphical design concepts into people's heads as possible and sort of teach some of the principles, vocabulary and methods that a lot of designers take for granted.

The response was great as far as I could tell. I also got the inevitable "How do we deal with Internet Explorer?" spin-off discussion in the questions round at the end ;).

Steven Peck recorded my session on video.

You can download the slides as PDF (36.5 MB), though because of all the graphics it's quite large. I think some sections will not be clear at all without the spoken explanation to go along with it though.

I'm proud to announce the start of ComicJuice, a web 2.0 social mashup tool that lets you create comics in your browser and share them with others.

Update: Now with Internet Explorer support! Thanks to Google's ExplorerCanvas. Viewing comics works in IE6 and 7, while editing still requires IE7.

The crazy part is that I started working on this only friday evening (that's 4 days ago). Once I had the initial idea and a rough plan, I simply couldn't not code it.

Recently, the Belgian anti-cancer charity Kom op Tegen Kanker launched a new campaign, and used Drupal to create the website, LaatWatZien.be. While it is nice to see such a high profile site use Drupal, generally the site is not as nice as it could be, especially in the design department. This is quite a missed opportunity for a campaign in general, as well as surprising, given the number of large media companies involved.

Still, complaining doesn't get you much, so I decided to do a constructive design review of the LaatWatZien front page, and not only point out problems but also suggestions to fix them.

And because I recently started evangelising design in Drupal, I've made the PDF available for others to see and maybe learn from. I'll be forwarding this to the web masters as well, obviously.

Making such a review is easy if the you have the right tools. On Mac, I do the following:

1. Using Paparazzi! (open-source), take a PNG screenshot of the entire page.
2. Open the PNG in Apple's Preview.app, then save to a PDF. This enables the various PDF annotation features.
3. Using the text box and oval tool, annotate the document, and save it.

The only downside is that the Preview.app interface is a bit spartan and that you cannot edit your notes after saving them. Still, it's easy and relies only on readily available tools.

In the past months I've been doing a lot more graphical design, and it's caused me to think about how it relates to Drupal. This prompted me to write a rather long blog piece with some insights and a call to action. If you are interested in the future of Drupal, please read on.