Component-driven Drupal: A team effort

On a recently completed project for a higher-ed client, Palantir worked with our client designer/developer to take a an integrated approach to our new design—building a robust and flexible design system that integrated as closely as possible with the CMS as possible.

What started as a training-heavy project took a turn due to client staffing changes, and we needed to quickly pivot to a workflow that tightly coupled Design and Engineering, while learning how to work in a brand new tool, as we’d identified Emulsify as our system to couple Pattern Lab and Drupal.

As we worked through our tickets, each content type helped us iterate on our process. Initially we forced everything into node templates (because that’s that our old fingers were used to in D7), but our aha moment came while building a complex beast that was a major component of the site. Through work which involved the entire team, we honed our method for designing and building. Breaking the node down into its respective atomic components and finally leveraging the full power of Emulsify.

In this session, we’ll walk you through our journey and our final workflow—from wireframing & data modeling, to design, front-end development, and engineering—all while putting the styleguide at the center of the project. You’ll walk away from this session with an understanding of how we quickly refined our design and development process in the context of an Emulsify-based project, and how you can bring our successes (and failures) back to your next project.