Designing for chaos: The design process behind Olivero

Olivero is a core initiative to create a new default theme for Drupal 9. Designing a core theme presents unique challenges as compared to designing traditional websites.

This talk will tell the story of what it’s like to design a theme for an open source content management system (CMS) and will answer questions like:
 

• What is Olivero, and why did we create it?
• What are the challenges of designing for an open source community made up of thousands of stakeholders?
• What compromises were made to make the design accessible?
• What are the challenges of designing for a CMS that will be used for a wide variety of sites?
• What approaches and methods did we use to do this successfully?
   

Throughout this session, we’ll walk through real-world methods and processes. We’ll discuss each stage, from the first conceptual “zoom mocks” to the various ideas along the way that never saw the light of day!