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MWEB GameZone Game Design Course Interview

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HTML and CSS Webdesign and Development

Dreamweaver 2011 Projects


Jacques Wessels: View Project


Maya Liepaz: View Project


Nicole Harding: View Project


Tracey Miller: View Project

Dreamweaver 2010 Projects


Chase Amyot: View Project


Milos Krstic: View Project


Liesl Rademan: View Project


Gareth Van Rooyen: View Project

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Newsletter Archive

You are in: Latest news Written by Friends of Design: On November - 8 - 2011

Adobe Muse, reviewed

How often has a small groan escaped your lips when presented with yet another creative brief with a web component? It’s daunting when faced with the apparent cross media skills required to meet such briefs and, whilst there is always the option of outsourcing the web aspects of a project to the nearest “propellor-head”, the frustration around the integrity of your original design becoming diluted in the process just adds further difficulty to managing such a project. What is the solution then, when code is just not your thing?

Adobe has recently unveiled Muse, a new Web design program that lets print-oriented graphic designers create and publish standards-based websites without having to write code or work within restrictive templates. The software, which employs Web standards such as HTML 5, CSS3, and JavaScript, has been released as a public beta under the code name, Muse, and will be available from Adobe’s website as a free preview until the first quarter of 2012.

Muse is a freeform tool targeted at designers who have worked thus far only in print, but who want to create interactive websites sans code. Adobe envisions the Muse designer as someone who spends most of their time working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Creative professionals will be able to use their current skills to combine images, graphics, and text in a process that is similar to working with InDesign.

Danielle Beaumont, Group Product Manager at Adobe, has made it clear that Muse was built with the artist and print designer in mind, allowing designers who are not coders to create unique, professional websites as easily as producing a layout in InDesign, stipulating that Adobe has worked really hard at creating an easy to use, end-to end-solution with interactive elements. It allows the designer to do things that only a hand-coder could do.

If designing in InDesign is your speciality, then you’ll feel at home using Muse. The interface is an interesting mix of InDesign and Dreamweaver. When first testing it, an immediate concern was around how effectively the text stylesheets were converted into CSS (cascading stylesheets), but the tool appears to do a pretty good job of it. Creating a basic layout was fairly straight forward, though there were some InDesign-specific features that were missing such as giving a text box more than one column and the Align palette, features we hope will be rectified in the future.

There are some useful extras for fledglings to Web design. For example, when you select text from the drop down box, Adobe identifies a web-safe font and which fonts will be exported as images. The Color Picker will let you key in RGB numbers and return the hexadecimal for that colour. The Eyedropper tool will run over any image and provides the hexadecimal and RGB values in the Color Picker. There are also palettes for spacing and text wraps around images.

While Muse doesn’t have any existing templates, it ships with basic widgets that allow you to add rich interactivity such as slideshows, galleries, menu bars, fully customizable tabbed accordion panels for organizing lengthy information into visually appealing bite-sized “chunks” and embedding HTML source code for Google Maps and YouTube. Included, too, are web-specific palettes such as states, where you apply an attribute to elements like rollovers, actions upon clicking a mouse, and more. Tool tips and remote rollovers are easy enough to implement and lightboxes that bring special focus to an image, video or other content, add a level of user interaction that would be tricky to included without coding knowledge. The Preview mode is put to good use throughout the layout process, you can test links to external websites from within Muse and you can also preview using external browsers. The Publish section is useless unless you have an Adobe Business Catalyst account, but that will probably be addressed in future releases.

Muse requires AIR 2.7 or higher to run, which can be an obstacle for some, an Intel Core Duo or faster processor is recommended, OS X 10.6 or higher, and at least 512 MB of RAM (1 GB is recommended). Muse will be available in early 2012 for around US $15 a month via Adobe‘s subscription model, but other options will be available.

Whilst clearly still only a beta version, it’s definitely worth checking out as Adobe has promised future features such as additional CMS integration and enabling the creation of websites for mobile and tablets. Visit the official site muse.adobe.com, made entirely with Muse, and read up about planning your project, tips on designing pages and publishing your site using Adobe for hosting or a provider of your choice. Get your ideas flowing by visiting some websites already created using Muse.

With the freedom to focus on design and not technology, now is the time to get out here and promote your newly acquired web skills with confidence.