Drupal 6 has a new theming layer that is wonderfully flexible and cool. And, yet, the themes that come bundled with Drupal 6 are the same old, boring ones we’ve had for a very long time.

But now we have a plan! We’ve outlined the steps we need to take in order to kill Blue Marine. During this session, we’ll present the current state of our plan, outline the quick steps we’ll need to make Drupal easier to theme, and discuss how to engage the larger CSS and Design community.

While typography is not specifically related to Drupal, it is a topic that is often treated stepmotherly by webdesigners. This session tries to give a basic introduction to typography in general and point out why it is important to respect some rules. It also shows you how you can achieve good typography and clear layout on web pages leveraging all kinds of technologies supported by modern browsers.

jQuery UI, built on top of jQuery, is a complete set of behaviors and components that can be used in building Rich Internet Applications. Behaviors and components included in jQuery UI include drag-and-drop, resizing, mouse-sorting, mouse-selecting (click-select, shift-select, ctrl-select, lasso select), dialogs, sliders, tabs, trees, grids, toolbars and menus.

The level of complexity in the Drupal administrative interface is increasing, as we are adding new features every core release and modules keep changing more we are faced with a lot of new challenges. We will take a look at what happened with the usability team and how we intend to move forward on all areas of drupal's user experience.

With the release of Drupal 6, phptemplate put a triumphant end to any alternative templating systems in Drupal. We've reached the holy grail of theming -- all that remains is to replace in-code theme() functions with preprocess hooks and churn out hundreds of template files, right?

Not so fast. In this session I will argue that the Drupal community needs to keep its eye on the ball -- true separation of data from presentation -- and argue why there is still more underlying work to be done.

CivicActions themers Trevor Twining and Bevan Rudge will help novice themers get up the learning curve and on their way to creating great, professional looking sites by demonstrating advanced theming tools, tips and techniques.

The session will have a lot of time of for Q&A and include code samples and examples to take home. Spot prize; copies of "Drupal 6 Themes" by Ric Shreeves.

A report back from the third round of formal usability testing of Drupal core - held at the University of Baltimore, a week before Drupalcon DC.

We'll give an overview of the state of usability in Drupal core, see where improvements have been made, where there's still work to be done. Building on the lessons learned from previous testing at UB and the University of Minnesota.

jQuery is a state of the art JavaScript framework, that Drupal uses. jQuery focuses on extensibility, flexibility, terse code, and ease of use, all of which align very well with the goals of Drupal. This session will give an introductory view on this key part of the Drupal User Interface.

Theres different ways of creating your badass & unique theme in drupal, from the "hey just clean it up in the css", to the "ill rewrite the hole thing goddammit!" This session will focus on the middle way. by using the "best theming practices" throwing in your own cutting edge front end style, and mixing it up with a bit of hard work it will be alive

Video at http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconDc2009-TheThemersToolkit

The tools available to Drupal 6 themers are amazing! Come learn about base themes, must-have modules, browser-based tools you can't live without and get a gentle introduction on how to convert Drupal 5 themes to Drupal 6. Woo!