Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and digital playground.

Yeah, this is old news by now but I've been wanting to express my opinion on this for a while about the chosen Design company (Mark Boulton Design) that is to redesign the Drupal.org site.

First of all, congratulations to Mark Boulton and his team for being selected out of the many other excellent design firms.

Over the past year, i've been following quite closely with Mark Boulton work when i first became interested in grid-based column layout designs and Typography.

As you can see, this site was inspired by Mark Boulton and many books and articles i've read on the web about grid-based column layouts. Having played about with different frameworks and finally settled for the Blueprint framework as the foundation to build upon for this site.

I'm really excited that the Drupal core team members have chosen Mark Boulton, they certainly know talents when they see one.

Drupal.org site is a huge challenge considering the amount of rich information and topics the site covers (from contributors). The diverse users at all levels will also no doubt present a huge challenge for the selected design team to please and make the site work for them.

I've no doubt that these challenges will be tackles with every bit of thoughtful analysis and care to cater for as wide an audience as possible.

At this stage, it's difficult to know what will be planned and used (ie, layout and design) but i'm confident to predict that a grid-based layout is just waiting around the corner to be used simply because i believe Drupal.org needs a magazine style site to accommodate the ever growing contents and topics that cover every angle of Drupal and its community of developers, and end-users. Since a magazine style site is much easier to organise contents and grouping of contents into different regions of the page, an easy navigational structure can be formed out of this. However, the biggest questions remain will be how the contents will be split up and grouped and what will be the main sections and subsections of the site. Another difficult challenge ahead would be - will Drupal itself as a CMS/CMF handle the design changes... i think the flexibility is there in the Drupal core.

Furthermore, this redesign may push Drupal to it's limits depending on how the site structure and architecture works, the process may reveals some design flaws for the internal workings of Drupal that needs to change for wider adoption (in a positive way). It's exciting times ahead and certainly about time for a fresh change (redesign). I have every faith within the Drupal community and the design team to polished up Drupal.org and let it shine like a diamond... :)

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