Learning How To Theme in Drupal, Starting at Square One
Now, for the 99.999217 percent of the population that doesn't understand why drupal theming is straightforward, I have bad news. You've got a lot of learning to do. In the beginning, the task of learning how to build a solid drupal theme is going to appear daunting, painful, confusing, sadistic, cruel, unusual, and most importantly, boring. I know these things because it wasn't long ago that I first started teaching myself HTML/CSS/PHP and began to learn how to apply it to drupal (November 2004). So forgive a LONG answer to a question that sought a short answer. Rest assured a short answer would have been a fairy tale.
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Ugh!
I really hate these CMS systems that make it so difficult to theme. I wish they could come up with some true WYSIWYG system, or at least something where you simply enter in the colors/artwork in text entry boxes to theme. Dealing with PHP and CSS is a major pain for 90% of the users out there - which is why 90% of the blogs out there use a standard theme that comes with the CMS.
I think that will be the
I think that will be the next step. CMS systems are not there yet. Although there are modules that make it extremely easy to change colors etc.
Wow, that's odd...
Wow, that's odd... I actually think Drupal theming *is* fairly straightforward. Especially when you make use of the PHPtheme engine instead of writing a .theme file from scratch in PHP. I just taught myself how to theme Drupal over the past weekend and although I don't consider myself a Drupal-themeing pro, I certainly was suprised to find it was much easier to do than I thought.
No matter what, you're going to need to learn XHTML and CSS if you want to seriously build a solid site design. I wouldn't trust a GUI system to do that for me, because sometimes a designer must not only design how the site looks... they must design how the code *works.* Learning XHTML/CSS is just as much a requirement of the profession, I think, as Photoshop/Illustrator is. Once you have a design layed out and themed with vanilla XHTML/CSS, all you need to do is start adding in the various PHP variables.