Drupal from the perspective of a Creative Director.

Please give us a detailed overview of your session and why attendees will be excited to hear about it.

I'll be honest, this wont be detailed. But here we go...

I'm a Creative Director, and I'd like to talk about the impact the Drupal Platform has on my ability to lead a strategy focussed design team who want to be pushing the limits of the web.

I'll start with the positives. I love Drupal. I love the open source mindset, and I love the community. I love that you've provided a way for people to create careers, to create agencies, and to slowly start to rid the world of Sitecore. That's all great but it comes at a cost. That cost is the taste of cheap vanilla essence.

The web is starting to look generic, act generic, and feel generic. Aside from design trends and lazy design there is something else at play, and from spending the last 6 months becoming involved in the Drupal community I'm starting to recognise patterns of development that are partially to blame. It seems to be that the very act of using Drupal causes a design shift, and while it's subtle it's amplified by your success.

So I'd like to discuss that, to chat through what I've found, because if Drupal continues to grow as it has done you're going to become the biggest tool to achieving the ultimate goal of Creative Directors and Designers everywhere. We exist to fight the ugliness, and we need you to help.

So thats it. I wanted to explain the world of the web from the point of view of designers, strategists, and clients. So we can, as a collective, remember that we're not here to do everything the easiest way, or to always use the same code patterns. We're here to make amazing things that solve difficult problems. And we can, we just have to ditch the pot of cheap Vanilla essence.

To answer your specific questions:

What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into your session --- None. They need only be interested in the thinking of somebody who doesn't do any development at all. And somebody who looks at Drupal in a very different way to them.

What will your session accomplish and what will attendees walk away having learned --- Hopefully it will help the Drupal community understand the pressures that exist beyond the development, and how they can make their working lives easier and more successful by understanding how designers and strategists have to think. At the very least it should spark some interesting debate.

Cheers, Andrew.