Posted Sat, 06/13/2009 - 13:03 by jay

First listing learning resources, and second listing technical tools & resources.

How to learn about Drupal theming

Drupal.org theme guide

The Drupal theme guide is the first place to start. Everything you need to get started is here, although sometimes the language and concepts are a little developer centric.
http://drupal.org/theme-guide

Drupal 6 Theme cheat sheet

This is a handy Drupal 6 PHPTemplate variables cheatsheet (PDF) available from minezone.org. Note that much of this information is included as comments in Drupal's core template files and in Genesis also (with additional comments for Genesis specific variables).
Theming Cheatsheet PDF

Drupal Dojo

The Drupal Dojo has many great tutorials including videos and was one of the original non d.o tutorial sites.
http://drupaldojo.com/lessons/

Mustardseed Media

These guys have tonnes of fantastic videos covering all aspects of Drupal. Many are about or pertain to theming Drupal, in particular episode 24, how to convert a static theme to Drupal 6 (quick intro video).
http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast

Design for Drupal Group

Design for Drupal is about bringing the community of designers together to be a part of the drupal community. It's about enabling designers and themers to do great stuff, coordinate efforts, come up with crazy ideas, and build a movement to make drupal beautiful.
http://groups.drupal.org/design-drupal

Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting

Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6. Probably my pick for best book to get started with Drupal theming.
Amazon link
http://drupal.org/node/442298 (Drupal write up).

Packt Publishing

Packt Publishing have loads of books on Drupal theming.
http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-books

Lullabot

Tonnes of articles, podcasts, links, snippets and they have books and a video course - in short, go there now.
http://www.lullabot.com

Usable tools and technical resources

Genesis and Zen starter theme Documentation

Both of these projects have excellent documentation and you can learn a lot from reading both sets of docs. Both themes also have extensive code commenting and include many useful snippets, methods and patterns themers can learn from or reuse.
Genesis Documentation
Zen Documentation

The Skinr module project

There's an exciting new idea germinating at Drupal.org: The skinr module.

960Grid project / theme

The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by structuring layout into a 960px wide set of 12 or 16 columns, and leveraging the regularity of grid math to accelerate and simplify page design. The NineSixty project at Drupal.org is a base theme implementing, and containing all the files provided by the 960 Grid System, including everything from the sketch sheets to all the styles from the framework, along with modifications to make it fit into Drupal.