Drupal Gardens' hosted web service offers a great way for designers to get up and running quickly with a Drupal website. Art Director Joy Burke shares the pros and cons of working with this new tool from the fine folks at Acquia.

Joy is building a website with Drupal Gardens for the first time. A hosted solution for rapid creation of Drupal-based websites, Drupal Gardens offers a wealth of features that streamline development time for creating page layouts, adding image galleries, and theming on the fly. It also offers Typekit integration, which allows for great web typography customization. Joy has found that Drupal Gardens simplifies the design process while also throwing in some restrictions as well. Here’s Joy’s take on the Drupal Gardens workflow as well as some tips for getting it up and running quickly.

Drupal Gardens and Typekit are a one-two punch for great web typography that's easy to implement. Here are nine quick steps to integration nirvana.

Are you working on a Drupal Gardens site and need Typekit’s great library of fonts? Or maybe you already have a Typekit account and want Drupal Gardens’ rapid deployment content management features. Both these tools offer a wealth of options for web designers to ramp up their projects. Here’s a quick run-through on getting them to play nice together.

The mobile landscape, although an already booming industry, is still considered uncharted waters for many businesses looking to expand brand awareness. If integrating mobile is on your business’ radar, here are some notions to get you started building a strong strategy.

In his keynote at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert said that if he had to build Drupal again from the ground up he would build it first for mobile devices and then support desktop users. In an amazingly short period of time, mobile devices have drastically shifted the online landscape to the point that in 2010 we crossed the threshold of over 50% of all Internet access is being done via handhelds of some sort .

Figuring out what’s best for your business in the ever-changing world of mobile content may mean making some smart decisions around whether your content should be delivered via a thick or thin client.

The thickness of a client refers to how much processing is done and how much data is stored on the client device versus the servers it interacts with. The more data and processing done, the thicker the client becomes. For example, take two different calendar applications.

Yesterday we did our first workshop with Pamela Meyer, creativity consultant and author of From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement and HR/Business consultant extraordinaire, Carol Semrad.

Pamela and Carol use improv techniques, mind mapping, and their own unique methodologies to help companies tap into their creative strengths, collaborate more effectively, and grow in ways that make sense for both businesses and the people they hire. We spent the majority of our time doing a custom variation of the tried and true SWOT analysis, but with a Pamela spin. Pamela’s take is that the W (weaknesses) and T (threats) in SWOT analysis leave too much room for focusing on negativity, which can undermine potential and get us bogged down trying to fix problems rather than working toward realizing what we are capable of.