Sometimes people refer to visual design as “doing magic”, because they realize that things look harmonious and pleasing, but they don’t know why. But if you can learn the principles behind the magic, then you’ll be able to create convincing designs on your own.

Evolving Web hosted another session of Evolve UX, our monthly UX Meetup for members of Montreal's user experience design community. As usual, we had a strong and enthusiastic turnout from people who wanted to both discover and showcase new projects. Hosted at the Evolving Web office, our Meetups provide a venue for designers and other digital folk to present and gather feedback on their latest projects.

So you have an idea. You want to build something because you think it will make some money. You make a business case. You develop specs. You get your design and dev team on board. You build it, and then you market the heck out if it.   

Your idea does all right. Your marketing spend gives you some traction. People use it for a while, but they don't seem to love it. Users start to leave for a competitor. You built a good product that functioned well. What happened?  

You designed a product. Not an experience.

Whenever we start a new Drupal project, we have to choose what kind of theme we're going to create. Are we going to use a framework like Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation? If so, do we start with a contrib base theme or do we implement the framework ourselves? Are we going to use a classic Drupal base theme like Zen or AdaptiveTheme? Or are we going to build the theme 'from scratch' starting with Drupal core or a core base theme? 

As Drupal themers and site builders, we often have to look for creative solutions to build landing pages. Landing pages are special pages often used for marketing campaigns, to attract particular audiences, or to aggregate content about a certain topics.