Theming Drupal - The gap between PHP Developers and Designers

Drupal is supposed be very flexible in terms of it's look. There are many Theme Frameworks (like Zen) where you get pretty far, only using CSS, but, what if you want to
* Modify forms
* Remove form elements
* Add additional markup to menu items
* Add additonal body classes
* and so on

In the past I have worked very successfully together with designers: They say what kind of mark-up they would like, the PHP Developer takes care of it. It would though be more effizient, if the Designer could read some PHP and knows the basics of "PHP Drupal Theming".

Slides as file:  theming - the gap between designer and developpers.pdf