Design to Drupal: Bridging the Handoff

By Kelly Smith, Senior UX Strategist

Skilled Designers, Always Growing

The CivicActions design team is known for being highly qualified. With 159 years of experience collectively, we are known for having the skills our projects need. We have designers who can build your pixel-perfect wireframes, and designers who can help you determine whether to use “Continue” or “Next” on your buttons. We have designers who can build low-code prototypes in figma for user testing, and designers who can deliver end-to-end project designs as the sole designer on their project.

But we also continually strive to be better, to continue to learn, to increase our skills. We primarily build sites in Drupal at CivicActions, so our designers have familiarity with it and designing for it. Drupal and design work together reasonably well, but there can be a lot of back-and-forth between designers and engineers to land on working, scalable designs that inherently work within Drupal. To bolster our existing knowledge, we decided to pursue the Drupal Site Builder Course from Acquia Academy.

Taking on Drupal Together

Half of our design team, plus a front-end engineer, embarked on the course in April of 2025. Meeting weekly over Zoom, we split up the course into manageable weekly learning units and used our meeting time as a standup: we’d share where we were in the learning, what felt successful, what blockers we had, and what questions we needed answered.

What emerged was a tight-knit study group of content and product designers, who learned together how to design within Drupal. We were familiar with Drupal itself, but needed to learn about its functionality to get comfortable using it as the starting point for our designs, rather than fitting our designs inside the Drupal themes. Even small details, such as understanding that Drupal’s help text appears under the content type rather than above it, help us deliver faster and easier-to-implement Drupal designs.

Drupal wasn’t our usual canvas. Even though we were somewhat familiar with it from designing at CivicActions, we hadn’t built our own site or configured settings, for example. Sometimes we found the course to be too technical, or too vague, and, in a few instances, intimidating. Even the vocabulary felt overwhelming at times — content entities, content types, content itself, everything being a node but also content — it was as if we were learning Drupal for the first time! Still, we saw an opportunity: if we could be successful in the course and learn how to merge our design instincts with a deeper understanding of Drupal’s backbone, we could build experiences that weren’t just human-centered, but were scalable, functional, and ready to grow.

So we got to work. We used our professional development time to go through the course and create our own waterfall sites. Our weekly meetings became filled with “aha!” moments and Q&A sessions where a once-confusing concept clicked into place. We supported each other in our learning and journeys, sharing notes, creating study guides, encouraging each other, and reminding each other why we started this in the first place: to stretch ourselves, to grow, and to prove that we could do hard things together. We finished the course the same way we started it, as a group, in June of 2025. All that was left was the exam.

Certification and Beyond

As of September 2025, four of our designers have taken and passed the Drupal Site Builder Certification Exam. What we’ve seen come from it is our ability to design smarter; we now understand the functionality (and limitations) that core Drupal presents, and we can create designs for and around them, instead of despite them. We stepped out of our comfort zone and became certified Drupal Site Builder designers, now equipped to bridge design and engineering in ways we hadn’t before imagined but now seem so easily accomplished.

But more than the credential or handoff, now we get to share with the world what we knew from the start: our CivicActions design team doesn’t stop at the edge of our comfort zone. We consistently hone our skills while expanding beyond our roles. We seek ways to make the design-to-engineer handoffs smoother and faster to implement. Having our designers complete the Drupal Site Builder course became a sense of pride and camaraderie, but also added one more skill to our toolbelt: we work better with our engineers, and we speak their Drupal language now. This has resulted in smoother transitions, faster implementation of our designs, and more scalability in our work.

Curious about how we apply these learnings? Check out how our work helps build a world that works for all.