Sebastopol, CA—Are you a solo web designer or part of a small team itching to build interesting projects with Drupal? Drupal for Designers (O'Reilly Media, $39.99 USD) provides the tools and techniques to get you going. Award-winning designer Dani Nordin guides you through site planning, teaches you how to create solid, user-centered design for the Drupal framework, and shows you tricks for using real, honest-to-goodness, developer Ninja Magick.

If you haven't given Drupal a try yet, Dani says there are two primary advantages to using Drupal over other frameworks like HTML and CSS:

"The first is the way that Drupal makes you think about design for the web; it presents a variety of new challenges, and actually forces you to consider issues of content and architecture before you push a single pixel. For those of us who are accustomed to a visuals-first workflow, Drupal can be an important way to introduce you to the concepts of content-first design. This is going to be increasingly important as websites continue to increase in complexity, and the mobile experience starts to overtake desktop in popularity.

"The second advantage to working in Drupal," says Dani, "is the community. Thousands of developers and themers contribute code to Drupal, including responsive base themes, modules that help create jQuery effects, and even modules that allow you to add complex functionality, like shopping carts, content moderation queues and customer databases, directly into your Drupal site."

This book is a compilation of three short guides—Planning Drupal Projects, Design and Prototyping for Drupal, and Drupal Development Tricks for Designers—plus exclusive "director's material." If you're familiar with HTML and CSS, but struggling with Drupal's learning curve, this is the book you've been looking for.

• Learn how to work user-centered design practices into Drupal projects
• Choose the right modules for your project, and discover several go-to modules
• Use strategies for sketching, wireframing, and designing effective layouts
• Manage Drupal's markup, including code generated by the powerful Views module
• Learn how to work with Drupal on the command line
• Set up your development environment and collaborate with other designers and developers
• Learn the basics of Git, the free open source version control system