Drupal can be a challenge to design for, and even more challenging to theme. It is well worth learning at least the basics of Drupal before you start creating designs.

While nearly any design can be make to work with Drupal its a huge benefit if the design works *with* Drupal rather than against it. This means the design takes into account how Drupal works and does not require a lot of dependant modules. The best way to learn this is to do it - install Drupal (we will help you do this) and enable all the core modules and add some content, comments, file uploads and so on. Shortly we will establish a designers test site where you will be able to login and play around with Drupal to get a handle on the default output of a basic installation of Acquia Drupal (Acquia's distribution of Drupal).

Drupal derives much of its functionality and features from addon modules (plugins). There are thousands of these community-supported modules which offer advanced support for images, video, jQuery plugins, audio podcasting, graphing, building complex lists of content, building unique content types, comments, advanced forums and many many more.

In short what we are saying is that if you can dream it, chances are Drupal can build it - so don't limit your design ideas to Drupals default output, but take into account things that are tricky to theme. For example, things that can be tricky:

* Forms - while easy to style with CSS, it can be tricky to change the layout of form elements in the theme layer (normally requires a module). Its not impossible but if you design *with* Drupal its easier. The caveat here is that any forms that are meant to be public facing you should just go for it, including comment forms, contact forms, user registration and login forms and node forms for sites where end users might be creating content, such as a social networking or citizen journalism sites.

* Non standard lists of content. For example on this site designers and themers have lists of their content on the user profile page. This is non-standard have been created with the Views module and theming the user profile template. While this is perfectly fine for you to include such elements in your design be aware that the themer will need to create a Views Export module to support them in the theme, and that they are unlikely to do this unless the design is of a high quality as this can mean a lot of additional work for the themer.

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