Classroom Event: Learn About Adobe Muse

This week our Digital Classroom Event series invited Adobe representative and designer Scott Citron to demonstrate Adobe’s beta application, Muse. The drag and drop website creation tool is built from familiar InDesign features that extends designing in print to the web.

School of Fashion BFA students are currently learning InDesign to take advantage of the software’s interactive capabilities to create dynamic e-portfolios.

Muse (code name), available for free in the beta version, takes the concept one step further and offers the ability to craft a fully functioning static website. However, dynamic content such as Google Maps, Twitter feed and contact forms can be imported into Muse and placed on one of your pages.

The core of Muse is its sitemap builder with Master Pages. InDesign users will certainly gravitate to placing content on their Masters that will keep the design continuity throughout the site. Once the sitemap is arranged, from the Menu palette, users can access the menu placeholder and the names used in the sitemap will appear in the menu. Styling text and formatting alignment is easily specified as in InDesign. In the background, Muse is writing the html, css and scripting necessary to power the site published in modern web browsers.

Finishing the presentation, Scott demonstrated the simplicity of creating slideshows with corresponding thumbnails on gallery pages. And of course utilizing popular Lightbox effects for slideshows are found in Muse and can be edited to match the look of your design.

Over the years, the trend definitely has gravitated to WordPress-like sites dynamically updating content and accessing information from the web. And the combination of social blogs such as Tumblr give the availability to upload your design portfolio to the web. These services provide templates but learning to edit or even create the code has always been an ambitious task for designers.

For content such as design portfolios or micro-sites, Muse is a powerful alternative to create an unique immediate web presence. Designers can personalize and specify their layouts and Muse will publish the pages to the web.

Visit the Muse site for their free tutorials and sign-up for future webinars.

Digital Classroom Event Series are hosted by Maura Jurgrau, Geoffry Gertz and Christopher Musci.