Drupal's Designer Future
In the past months I've been doing a lot more graphical design, and it's caused me to think about how it relates to Drupal. This prompted me to write a rather long blog piece with some insights and a call to action. If you are interested in the future of Drupal, please read on.
The trigger was that I noticed that I'm getting less and less motivated to do graphics work for Drupal. It's not that I don't like design... I loved designing and building that LeuvenSpeelt.be site last month for example. But when it comes to Drupal graphics, the personal reward that I feel from doing it doesn't seem proportional to the effort I put in. This includes designing little banners for the Drupal.org spotlight, doing a t-shirt, making ad buttons, doing the association theme and more.
The most recent big example was the Garland theme. When Stefan Nagtegaal showed a work-in-progress version of his 'Themetastic' theme (as it was then called) in September, I was instantly charmed and knew that this was our new default theme in the making and said so clearly.
Many others were not convinced though and hammered on details, even though the basic design for the theme was rock solid. Some were not convinced of the theme's potential, or simply didn't see that we needed a theme that was graphically smashing rather than a good base to develop on.
At that point, I essentially said "screw the community, this is going to be our default theme" and started refining the theme so it was perfect for core. This took several weeks.
Until then, the rest of the community put its eggs in the wrong baskets and got a lot of useless design-by-committee done. These designs, which were in my opinion mediocre at best, were being pushed for inclusion. This may sound a bit harsh, but I honestly believe that if the most popular candidate theme, Deliciously Zen, had become the new default core theme, we'd have been ridiculed for still not 'getting' design after 6 years and Drupal 5 would not have been such a big release. Just like 4.7, most people would not stick to Drupal long enough to discover how good it is.
Now, when the Garland theme was finally done, everyone suddenly changed their opinion and congratulated the community on its excellent work. I have to admit this hit a nerve, especially after I'd been spending countless days and nights the two weeks before fixing annoying IE rendering bugs, redoing the CSS layout and adding a whole new layer of Glitz und Glanz to Drupal core.
Only three people did serious work on what became the Garland theme: Stefan Nagtegaal did the original design from scratch and worked with Adrian Rossouw to come up with a proof-of-concept of the recolorable theme. I wrote the color picker, improved the theme and coded what became the color.module based on Adrian's stuff.
Only a handful of people helped with testing of the theme during its development and only after the main theme was finished — most of the bugs were in the recoloring mechanism. How can such a vital piece of Drupal 5 have only have 3 serious contributors, when the whole release had almost 500 people submitting patches?
To me, this shows that we have a problem in the Drupal community, or rather a knowledge void. Not enough Drupal people are savvy enough about theming and design to help out with even small tasks (like a banner) or even give quality tips and feedback on other work. The result is that theming and design receives little attention. Most contributed themes and sites could look a lot better, if they just themed it some more. And getting patches into core that give the defaults a little more oomph is tough, as they are often considered to be useless embellishments.
Still, ever since Drupal started, there has been the recurring cry of doing more to attract great designers to the platform. The overall effects of this have been minimal. However, something similar did happen before.
Before Drupal 4.0 was released, the focus was mainly on features and Drupal was a highly experimental project. After a while, as more people started using it, many users complained that Drupal was too hard or confusing to use. Because of this, 4.0 was the first of many releases that contained significant usability improvements, in this case in the administration area. Many small and large usability features were added. With the menu system and tabs having been added to core by Drupal 4.5, even contributed modules started using the same UI concepts as core. Drupal's UI ended up much more consistent across configurations and it became easier to learn and document. Now with Drupal 5.0, we have undoubtedly produced the most usable release yet.
How did this happen? Over the years, the idea has popped up many times to bring usability experts on board to do a review, and the hope has lived that a usability expert or two will magically pop up in the community and solve all our problems (sound familiar?). Neither has happened so far.
What did happen is that usability became a big priority for the project, and as a result, many people started educating themselves about it. The community quickly identified those in its ranks knowledgable about usability and listened to their advice. Soon, big UI gurus were being quoted on the mailing lists and "-1 isn't usable" became a valid reason to dismiss a feature. Sure, this process took time, but it definitely happened. Plus, the combined usability knowledge and effort of the community, though individually not at expert level, had a much larger effect in the long run than any single expert could have.
The same needs to happen for design. For years now, the Drupal community has been hoping for a group of prodigy designers to magically appear and design a set of jaw dropping themes and UI. They have not shown up. Talking and maintaining a high quality of design across Drupal still often feels like swimming upstream, because most community members don't care much for design unless it is delivered in front of their noses on a silver platter. For many, design is still something to only be enjoyed, not something to be created.
Now, I really want to see this change. For one thing, the shortage of design talent means Drupal is generally perceived to be ugly. It's quite demotivating, because we put a lot of time into it. Unfortunately people illogically, but consistently, assume a relation between how something looks and how good it is built. With Drupal 5 we've done a lot to improve this, but we could still do a lot better. Drupal is no OS X (yet).
For another, when only a handful people are always doing the same jobs, the passion tends to slip out and the challenge becomes a chore. I honestly have no ideas left for a spotlight banner at the moment. That's why the scalability banner is so mind-numbingly boring, though I made plenty of cool ones before.
This is also why I'm holding that OSCMS talk about design this month: I want more people to realize that if your site and/or module is ugly, people aren't going to like it or use it. It's as simple as that. If you mess up something as basic as text formatting, your message simply doesn't get through (hello MySpace users). The only way to change that is to put in the effort to make things look clean and nice. Nice products and nice sites tend to cause happy, dedicated and long-term users.
The community not only needs to realize this, but also needs to teach itself the knowledge and skill to do something about it. Drupal has infinite potential, but it only goes where the community takes it. If the majority remains allergic to design and graphics, very little will change and only at a glacial pace.
Drupal designs
I'm writing as someone who has followed the Drupal development for about 4 years now. I'm neither a developer or a designer. Maybe "advanced hobbyist" would be a good description. I do have education in both programming and information design, however. And now that we are looking at Drupal in my school as a possible website solution, I'm really paying attention!
I would have to echo Steven's comments about Drupal being seen as "ugly". Obviously it's not fair; you can do amazing things with the design of Drupal (witness Steven's theater site). Drupal's strength is its interior architecture -- absolutely amazing stuff. That stands to reason, since almost all of the Drupal people seem to come from the development side. Developers sometimes don't see the need for a good design for the interface (I've heard some refer dismissively to design as "pretty pictures"). But information design is much more than "pretty pictures", and even more than just "usability". Color, placement of text, fonts, balance of objects, etc., all play a role in making the user experience not only pleasant, but efficient.
I don't have a solution for this. Like Steven, I hope that some great designers will magically arise (it's happened with Joomla). Perhaps the usability and user-friendliness of 5.x will help eliminate barriers to entry for those people. There has definitely been improvement in the themes available. We need mutual respect between the "prop heads" and the "ponytails".
Agreed...
I agree with you. We need to learn to be designers. Personally, I am an engineer and just don't have that artistic touch. I would love to learn to make better designs. Is there any chance you can post that presentation from OSCMS online somewhere? I am sure it would be a great help to a lot of people.
The other day a couple of us were talking about drupal is ugly. I think this may be the single most important thing with picking Joomla! over drupal.
corporate designing
I'm only following Drupal since the end of 2004, but I am convinced that great design, i.e. designers, will not magically arise. Designers have another spirit then software writers. I quote a teacher at the graphical department here in Gent (Belgium): "My students do not wish to work together, they keep their ideas and work for themselves". I don't know whether that's true for most of the designers out there, but it indicates that designers think/work differently than oss people.
But now and then, you have software writers who can not only code well, they design too (2 x Steven, Chris Messian and some others). And since they have the OS spirit, they share their work.
Anyway, my idea on this: perhaps you should address this post to corporations rather than the community. They are paying designers to make a nice theme for their site. If they would contribute it back, it might make a difference on the long run. I believe that the Spread Firefox theme was contributed this way. Correct me if I'm wrong.
How About a Theming Contest?
I am working on my second Drupal site now and have spent quite a bit of time designing and now building my theme. (I'm not a designer, but I'm learning fast...)
At one point, I considered giving up and using Wordpress. Then, a funny thing happened. I had gotten so familiar with Drupal, that theming Wordpress seemed harder. So, I'm back to my original plan.
The key, I think, is getting people with a design background interested in Drupal in the first place -- and past the belief that theming is too difficult in Drupal. Then, they'll stick with it an contribute. I'm not sure if just anyone can create beautiful graphic design. It takes an artistic sense. So I think such people have to get involved.
Perhaps a theme design contest with some kind of prize would do the trick? I'm a PR guy and that's what I would do to generate interest.
I believe it worked well for Wordpress.
Hear ye, hear ye
I think you're championing a great cause, and it's great having someone with a strong aesthetic sense and realization of its importance in Drupal's upper echelons.
I think some clarification is in order, though. By "designs", do you mean gorgeous front pages, do you mean contributed themes, do you mean the actual Drupal elements (that are often unchanged and commonplace) like comment forms and search and content creation screens? Probably all of the above?
I think you'd like to see a theme that handles the front page display differently, perhaps utilizes Ajax techniques where appropriate, and (most importantly, IMO) really takes advantage of the powerful theme overrides to make all the input boxes and Drupal generated elements much prettier and usable and cleverly positioned. So would I. But then, this would become everyone's theme, and that's rather boring.
I think you'll see designers do such a thing for their own projects much before you'll see anyone contribute all that to the Drupal community, and they can't be blamed: The look, the design is what really differentiates one site from the next, one workflow from the next (often theming CCK + Views versus a whole theme) and so effort there is effort spent on one's own site. Contrast that to the underlying code, which is the engine, and it's ok for everyone to use the same engine, and for developers to contribute back to that common engine, because it's under the hood, and you then get to paint your hood a different color, if you will (though many don't choose to or can't). Part of that has to do w/ the complexity of code and a powerful system like Drupal -- it just makes sense for everyone to work together on that beast, while design is more of a differentiator.
I think there certainly needs to be more knowledge of the theme system in Drupal and its power. Maybe better documentation would help, hopefully the new Pro Drupal Techniques book will help, and certainly more committed and involved users would help. But I imagine we'll see design work applied to individually owned projects before we'll see it applied to the community. That said, it inevitably helps the community in numerous ways, anyway -- by demonstrating better Drupal sites, showing what's possible, generating snippets and techniques and knowledge, and possibly improvements to the theme system.
Me? I think Drupal should really focus on being a content and community management system and focus more on informational display while of course allowing all that to be themed well. I think Drupal largely takes that approach, and CCK and Views are great in that arena. I personally would love to see a theme that used Ajax techniques to grab information w/o refreshes... like the Gmail interface. While we're talking, I'd love to see a real messaging interface so every module sent e-mail notifications or internal notifications (like moderation queue, unread messages, etc...) cleanly via one channel. Let's focus on Drupal as a system versus Drupal as a pretty brochure-like site.
Sorry for the ramble. More to say later.
--D
Great commentary.
The joy of coding Drupal far outstrips the pain of CSS and browser compatibility. Every time someone complains that Garland has such-and-such a problem in IE6, I want to kick them in the head.
Lots of small steps...
I agree
I just recently (post 5.x release) converted from self-produced CMSs to Drupal and I'm loving it (1 site running and 2 in development). And that's mostly because of the Garland theme, because if it still had the theme of 4.7, I wouldn't even consider Drupal even though it has a great themeing system with high plasticity.
I a little bit doubtful whether the growth of the usability knowledge within the community is a good comparison of what will/should happen to the design knowledge. Usability is a concrete subject that can be read about, learned and transfered to other people and applied. Designing a graphical enjoyable and beautiful website/theme is a trade, it's not really knowledgeable. So in stead of hoping that people will eventually become the best designers, it's more a need of trying to get already great designers
to work on and with drupal. How?
Well there are a few initiatives out there called operating with the intention of creating Open Source Webdesign (oswd.org and openwebdesign.org), that could be of assistance. They have a big user base, of which a few are quite talented.
Also, what farrell said above me: issue an design contest. On a few commericial webdesign forums I visit, these are often very succesful. This is of course not free, but generates often a lot of good work, although you'll have to reach the right audience of course (so not just drupal.org). If it doesn't result in great designs, at least it grew some awareness and interest in the design-part.
And last but definitly not least: contact the pros, especially the companies that are using drupal as their main CMS for their customers. Ask people of designes promoted on sites such as unmatchedstyle.com to lend a hand. It never hurts to ask, right?
Maybe it's a nice idea to dump your story at the designers group @ drupal.org. Because that group is kinda silent and it should be the one that is working its butt off to relieve to small number that are currently doing all the work.
BTW, as I said, I'm new to drupal, but very enthousiastic about it. Besides a programmer, I also design quite a bit. As bug fixing and porting old modules can get boring at times, I wouldn't mind helping the designteam out. Where can I keep informed about what needs to be done (for example those flashlight banners you mentioned)?
Left brain, right brain
Good points. I think Dave Notik's point about code being universal but design being unique also is a great insight. I can feel for you re the Garland development. Design is hard enough without a world of critics harping on every detail. (The outcome is pretty nice, and your color widget is simply awesome!) I tell young designers: if you want praise, find another profession, or do it for the love of it and ignore everybody.
It seems to me that one of the biggest impediments to getting more design work contributed to Drupal is CVS. Let's face it: designers are not coders. Most of the designers I know have no background in programming, and the arcane mysteries of CVS are simply not in their ken.
Beyond that, I think a large part of Drupal's challenge for a designer is its power. Theming for so many different kinds of content is way way beyond what's needed for most other "web 2.0"-type platforms. There are quirks and frustrations that persist, from non-semantic embedded css to un-tagged UI elements that force themers to resort to phpTemplate overrides -- i.e., programming -- but from my perspective it's getting better with every release.
Still, while it can only help, I don't see a call for programmers to think like designers getting us very far on making Drupal not "ugly." Usable, yes, but beautiful? Design is right brain and programming is left brain. While some people can excel in both, most people are predominantly strong in one side or the other. Really, if we truly want Drupal as a platform to excel design-wise, I feel we need to make the Drupal community more accessible and welcoming to designers. I don't know how, exactly, but most artsy types aren't going to dive into self-education on CVS in order to give away design that others will say sucks -- and those who do are going to run into roadblocks every time it hit the unavoidable program code required to do x.
Trying to help address that goal was the inspiration for proposing the theming session at OSCMS -- trying to make the theming process a little less mysterious to the geek-inspired but not necessarily code-savvy Drupalers.
I do take heart, though: Your sessions on design and jQuery and our session on theming are the top 3 favorites on the OSCMS voting to date. There's no denying there's interest in the subject.
As somone....
...who started off 10 years ago as a print design/production manager at a printshop which was only a couple miles away from CalArts (one top three design school in the U.S.) in southern California, and then went to working as the online production manager for the former head illustrator of MacWorld at a design/ad agency in San Francisco, and am now trying to bridge the gap to being a full-fledged Drupal developer I definitely feel identified with that part of the world. (*I claim only to be of the 'junior/layout designer' caliber - I'm definitely not a 'true' designer)
Honestly, from all of the 'true' designers (those just talented at birth) I've ever known - here are a couple generalizations:
I'm not sure if anyone will take this suggestion seriously or not - but if the Drupal Association wants to help promote the Drupal platform and advance it's visual/aesthetic perception it would do well to commission some artists to provide photoshop files and then have members of the Drupal community 'Drupalize' them.
Alternately or in conjunction, the Drupal Association could sponsor a design contest in which the submissions were given as photoshop files to be converted later.
The point which is hidden in those suggestions, and which I really believe to be an immutable truth, is that it will always be extremely rare to see true design specialists ever take the plunge into *any* code, let alone validated code, and/or Drupal.
I couldn't agree more, Design is Important!
You hit the nail right on the head. When I first started using Drupal ages ago I was instantly drawn to it because of the programmer in me. However time after time, I wished that the Drupal community was a bit more designer friendly. Though the programming aspect of web design and applications is important design is just as crucial. In the end Joomla seems to get the very best of the CMS designers and Drupal the very best of the programmers.
Sorry to not get this in the other post...
but some links to better illustrate the difference between - 100% bonafide, credentialed, educated, and ridiculously talented/cutting-edge graphic design and what the Drupal community as a whole currently consider. These are the kind of people Drupal need to reach out to if they want to promote the aesthetics:
Drupla themes are great foundations
I believe there are two ways to look at themes:
1. A theme can be solid foundation to build your custom design on.
2. A theme can be a beautiful design out-of-the-box.
For people like me – and I would hope most web developers – I don’t care about #2. Whatever the theme is, I am going the radically change the look of it anyways.
I care a lot about #1. And from my experience, Drupal has no problem with #1. By the way, Zen is an excellent foundation theme. I also use Burnt a lot.
Joomla (for example) clearly beats Drupal on #2. But who cares? It is mind-numbing the number of different designs there are for Joomla – and just gives me a headache. Give me a handful of great “foundation themes” over thousands of designs any day.
Drupal core is all about being a rock solid foundation – and I see it as no different for Drupal themes.
I am sorry about all the problems with developing Garland - its awesome, so thank you for all your work on it!
Art takes authors
Design by committee generally doesn't work. It doesn't work for modules either.
Your point about the lack of useful feedback from the #drupal community on design ideas (vs more useful feedback on engineering questions) is insightful, and seems correct, but don't loose sight of the fact that great themes or great designs generally spring from a single individual's creativity.
That said, having more of a community emphasis on beauty and usability would be a good thing.
I think Drupal can continue to do more to improve the admin UI -- which is already getting better -- and extend those improvements for contributed modules that want it. The foundation is there in Form-API; all that's needed are more examples of "doing it the Drupal way."
As for front-end stuff, it's really a matter of getting more artists involved. Beauty breeds beauty. This is a different motivation for people than the idea of "theme = foundation." There's room for both, I think.
Professionalism
If I can defend "'true' designers" out there for a moment (heh) .... Caleb, it sounds like you're describing people who aren't professional in their work ethic, and that can happen in any field as a symptom of personal failings sometimes, but in my experience is more often the result of poor management and/or education. I don't feel graphic design is particularly special in that regard, except that so many of the schools out there seem to be woefully under-serving and ill-serving their students by not teaching them (a) how to criticize work, (b) how to take criticism and (c) how to work the critical process into creative work both personally and collaboratively ... not to mention continuing to push Dreamweaver as some sort of professional web design skill (ha!) while not teaching CSS (one of our major frustrations as we go through resumes of recent design graduates).
That said, I think appealing to the design-centric worlds out there is a positive idea. I don't know if contests are going to draw many -- after all, so much of design isn't competitive, it's expressive -- but somehow working to make Drupal less obscure and opaque to designers would be a definite positive development, imho. Maybe just having contributions on just the design comp level would be a start (and add fivestar voting to it to add competitive flavor for kicks)?
Being part a designer I
Being part a designer I agree with Rick Hood about this. From a designer point of view I couldn't care less about Garland since I would build my CSS from scratch anyway. And from what I've read Garland isn't even a good starting point if that's what you're doing.
But Garland is oh-so important for appealing to people in general, it's delicious ("lickable" to use a phrase from Steve Jobs) and way beyond Blue Marine as a face to show Drupal off.
(Being a Mac user for a long time it's apparent that what sets Apple apart from many other companies is that they "get" design, all the way up to the top of the leadership. That good design is more than just a fancy look. The usability improvements of Drupal is sort of a design thing to, but the good look is of course the main part.)
It's one thing to make a good-looking theme for your own creations, and a whole another thing to release it as an all purpose theme. It's an awful lot of work to make a really good and well working theme and then you have to support it as well. Maybe that's what is keeping designers from doing themes for Drupal?
+1 on the contributed design comps
This is a great idea, Laura. Additionally, people (myself included, naturally) can make handbook page to direct people to resources like this.
Just want to be clear that I don't disagree with your points about professionalism. It's got to be hard for students to get the information when the information is slow in getting to the teachers though. For instance one of the premier teachers at that school was a gentlemen by the name of Ed Fella. He's a world famous typographer. And he wouldn't know a computer from a boat anchor. Whenever he brought in stuff to be printed it was mechanical hand-drawn artwork. That was '99, so maybe things have improved since then, but yowsers - what a starting point!
I agree with most of what
I agree with most of what you've said, Steven - with the exception of:
For years now, the Drupal community has been hoping for a group of prodigy designers to magically appear and design a set of jaw dropping themes and UI. They have not shown up.
The fact that you're a huge part of the community, and have been a critically important part of the group that produced the Garland theme (which continues to be jaw-dropping to everyone who actually uses it for more than a minute or so) shows that just such a group has shown up.
I, for one, really hope that you can put up with the cr*p and can continue to show the rest of us how well it can be done. I can't design for nuts (and my coding is probably at best something to be avoided :)) but I do appreciate and recognise good design when I see it - and have some feeling for the effort that's gone into to making it look like there's been no effort at all.
Garland is a wonderful piece of work. It has shown that Drupal can have beauty that's "skin deep". And that lets more people get to know the beauty that's hidden inside too. What, I think, sets the 5.0 release apart from what's gone before and everything else that's out there is that it's good all the way through - and a large part of that is due to Garland.
So please don't stop. We (the under-talented and under-appreciative of the community) need you :)
Let me quote
While I try to educate myself in interaction/interface design but graphics does seem like arcane voodoo magic. I will be delighted to listen to your presentation in SF as you dispell this myth.
Design Talent
I don't think a design contest will work that well. As has been said, making a generic Drupal theme is simply an order of magnitude more complicated than e.g. a WordPress theme. In fact, designing for Drupal requires a shift in thinking for most designers too: Drupal is simply a very powerful system that goes beyond what any individual site does.
Plus, even if we do get some finished designs that style more than just the bare basics, that does not guarantee that the themes will be maintained. The only way to ensure themes get maintained is for more people to know HTML/CSS and design.
Here's an analogy: someone contributes a patch, but it is found to decrease performance quite a lot. If all the reviewers can say is "It's too slow", nothing will likely happen. But if they say "It's too slow, take a look at optimizing these queries and maybe implementing some cache for these objects", it's likely to be improved and committed soon. However, in order to give this sort of feedback, the reviewer must be familiar with all aspects of software design.
Trying to review a design, when you do not know much about layouts, colors, composition and typography other than what your taste tells you, is completely analogous. It is this sort of knowledge that is lacking. Would you review code purely on taste, without facts to back it?
I don't expect that after I give that design talk, a room full of Picasso's will walk out. From Drupal 4.0 to Drupal 5.0 took us nearly 5 years to spread usability skill and awareness in our community. I just hope that it will set in motion a similar process and introduce the principles and vocabulary that designers use.
Also...
joshk: Personally I think some designers would benefit from getting out of their ivory towers and realize that working together with others can often result in a better design. Design by committee generally goes wrong because there is no single vision or idea, not because it is inherent in the process. For example, when I took Themetastic and turned it into Garland, my goals were clear (and I told Stefan that):
These were things that were required of a generic, default core theme, and which were not 100% there yet. But I don't think I touched the basic idea or design of the theme that much.
It also needs to be pointed out that doing any sort of work (be it code or design) in group necessitates extra work and process to succeed.
Brad: I don't think designers magically popped up. Me and Stefan have all been long time contributors. I've seen Stefan do Drupal design over the past years, and I've clearly seen his abilities improve too. I think you can see the same evolution e.g. for every edition of my LeuvenSpeelt designs. It's a long process that takes work. My point was that if nothing else happens, the few skilled designers will get tired of being the graphics gimps-du-jour and Garland will remain a one hit wonder that slowly dies out.
Laura Scott: I'm very aware that design is a 'trade', but I still think that lot of the geek/designer opposition is an irrational one and that designers will never feel welcome in the community unless we 'walk a mile in their shoes'. I do think that teaching design to geeks needs to happen differently than to designers, which is exactly what I intend to do :).
As for presentation slides: I'll put them up when they're done and the session has passed, but I don't want to make them available unless the video or at least audio is there to accompany them. Many of my slides are just large images with some circles to indicate things I talk about, and a lot of the message would get lost.
Keep up with the good work!
Garland is a great theme.
It is not easy to be good designers indeed, but it is very easy to recognize them from their work.
I agree with all who think that a group of great designers has shown up.
When I was looking for a CMS, I learnt of Drupal by reading the following statement in a blog comment written by a professional:
I disregarded the second part of the post and tried Drupal anyway. In a few hours I became passionate about it.
The post dated 11 March 2005. Meanwhile, in just two years, the 'face' of Drupal and its usability have been greatly improved.
I am sure that she would write no buts in her comment now.
Thank you and keep up with the great work.
learning curve...
Just to throw in my approach to this drupal & design...
First off -designers will never get as many kudos points in an coding environment, it will always be some kind of black art : what we are doing whith photoshop, as well as drupals menu code is way beyond what i understand ;)
The biggest step as a designer as i see it, is actually the learning curve. Drupal is easy (kinda) to get started at: fire up the 5.1 with the standard theme and your up and running with a nice design in no time.
But is dosnt like WP tell you what to do - afaik only a user who wants so create a blog is downloading & installing WP, when you get drupal you must actually think - then lets say this user know what he wants to create a site for the local sport club, he installs drupal, get some moduls, and get a theme or two, if his a tech dude - well my guess is he says: we got all the functionality, and i looks nice - so my work is done...
Well if his like me, then before he even got to the point at thinking bout php & drupal he got a bunch of design draft all layed out - and then its very hard to se how drupal can do all the magick stuff, unless you know about cck, views, image cache etc
When it comes to getting the designing from photoshop to drupal - you have to get into this theming stuff, and if it wasnt for the last 5 years with a php manual at my desk, i would have been totally lost (i cant even count the times i did print_r($foo) the last 6 months to get som idea bout WTF is going on)
The learning curve to get into the theming is for "normal" web devs. not an easy task, what i have been missing the most is some kinda "how to implement a design