07 Jul Design 4 Drupal, Boston 2017 – Where Design, Business, and UX Intersect

This past month we had the the great opportunity to be the main marketing team for a fantastic event in the local area, Design 4 Drupal, Boston. This was the 9th annual event for Design 4 Drupal, Boston and took place in the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, MA.

Design 4 Drupal, Boston is a 3-day conference “where drupal design, business, and ux techniques intersect.” This focus allowed us to bring in a variety of different speakers from many different backgrounds - all willing and eager to share the Drupal love and knowledge.

So what exactly could you have experience at this conference? With many different tracks - each guest had the freedom to choose courses and seminars that fit their taste. For example, if you or your business is just starting with Drupal - you could have taken advantage of the training courses. Over three days you would start with learning “Drupal Basics” and eventually work your way with building an entire Drupal website - themed and everything.

However this conference was not just for people to learn about Drupal - it even was beneficial to those who already considered themselves well-versed. Each session was categorized so that guests could make informed decisions on what they wanted to learn about. There were intriguing sessions like Variable Fonts & the Future of Web Design and Adobe Illustrator Primer for UX and Development for those who are design oriented. If you’re working behind the scenes on sitebuilding or theming there were plenty of sessions like Entity Reference as a Component-based Site Builder , GUI Grids, and Debugging, Profiling, & Rocking Out with Browser-Based Developer Tools! In fact, even if you are more business oriented and wanted to focus on strategy or wanted to hear about Drupal Case Studies like Making mass.gov data-driven and constituent centric. There were several different seminars to attend so you could get exactly what you wanted out of the long weekend. Our team had a blast learning different aspects of Drupal and how it can be used successfully in different ways.

However, nothing was as highly anticipated as the two keynote speakers for the event - Responsive Design: Beyond Our Devices by Ethan Marcotte and Agile Design by Kelly Albrecht. Both of these sessions were really able to touch on where Drupal, along with the rest of the web development industry, is heading in the future and what we need to do in order to keep up. Albrecht talked about how agility can help in the creative process of business, and how it is important for all teams in the business to follow the agile process. Marcotte spoke about how the idea of responsive design is in fact changing and it is important to be able to shift from building pages to building patterns.

Overall, this 3-day event was extremely successful, and was filled with opportunities to learn from our colleagues. We can’t wait for next year’s Design 4 Drupal, Boston event! For more information about the event, and to see recordings of each session go to design4drupal.org