Adobe Muse is an exciting new tool from the world's foremost software design company, which allows users to create beautiful and fully-functioning websites without writing any code. It provides graphic designers the power to use their print design skills over the Web.
This book will help web designers as well as graphic designers to master Adobe Muse quickly. It will provide step-by-step instructions that guide you through building a website with Adobe Muse.
Learning Adobe Muse will teach you how to plan, design, and publish websites using Adobe Muse. It starts by covering the tools and interface of the program and moves on to the concepts you'll need to understand for laying out your web pages. You'll learn how to format text using reusable styles, add images, create a clean navigation system, and add interactive elements such as panels and slideshows to your pages and all this without writing a single line of code!
By the end of the book you will have created a smartly designed, fully-functioning website.
Chapter 1, Welcome to Muse, discusses how Muse enables us to create websites without writing code. We will familiarize ourselves with the Muse workspace, its tools, panels, and the document window. We look at shortcuts for each of the tools which are well worth spending some time learning as you go.
Chapter 2, The Muse Workflow, addresses some of the challenges faced by designers creating web pages. These include making your design look good when viewed on multiple browsers at a variety of resolutions, and making it fast-loading. We look at the Muse Workflow and the steps involved in taking a website from an idea to a published website.
Chapter 3, Planning your Site, discusses some of the basic layouts used in web design. We look at the idea of wire framing using pen and paper and also how to set up a website structure and wireframe in Muse.
Chapter 4, Powerful Pages, looks at the concept of Master Pages and how we use them to apply a look-and-feel across many pages. We will learn how to add simple text onto individual web pages and how to add links. We use some of Muse's layout tools, namely guidelines, and the grid overlay to align our content.
Chapter 5, The Joy of Rectangles, teaches how to set up a flexible background rectangle. We added rectangles to our pages and manipulated their size, Fill color, and Stroke, and learned how to add effects such as drop shadows.
Chapter 6, Typography, Muse, and the Web, looks at how to add and style text on our web pages. We examine how to combine images and text wrapped together in a text frame. We discuss the importance of headings both from an organizational and SEO point of view, and we see how to add the hidden (to human visitors) metadata to our pages.
Chapter 7, Working with Images, teaches how to add images to our pages and how to manipulate them by changing their position, rotating, duplicating, and cropping them. We discussed the type of image file formats that are suitable for use on the Web and how to choose the appropriate format.
Chapter 8, Customizing with Widgets—Menus and Panels, looks at how to create a menu bar for our entire website. We style the menu, and the individual menu items which appear for each page in our website structure. We will use an Accordion panel as a way to put a large amount of text on a page without taking up too much space.
Chapter 9, More Widgets—Compositions and Slideshows, discusses Composition and Slideshow widgets, which allow us to add some very useful interactivity and functionality to our pages without as much as a hint of coding from our end. We also look at how to take code from another website (such as YouTube, Google Maps, or Twitter) and embed it into our Muse web pages.
Chapter 10, Muse, Meet the Adobe Creative Suite, examines how we can create a layered image in Photoshop and then place it as a Photoshop button in Muse. This allows us to create buttons with multiple states which is a useful way to give feedback to our web visitors. We will also see how easy it is to take an image created in another program and copy-and-paste it into Muse.
Chapter 11, Previewing and Testing your Site, looks at how to preview your page within Muse and in a browser, how to preview the entire website in a browser, and how to export the site as HTML and its associated assets. We also discuss testing and what you as the designer should be checking for, and we provide some tips on making your website mobile device friendly.
Chapter 12, Publishing Your Site, discusses how to publish and launch your website. You can publish using Adobe's own hosting with Business Catalyst or you can export your website as HTML and then upload it to a host of your choice.
This book is written for beginner web designers and also graphic designers who are interested in using their print design skills on the Web. It will teach you how to quickly build websites without the need to learn HTML or CSS.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can see an example of this in the previous screenshot where the site name Windsurf has an asterisk beside it."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " Notice that the Prototype thumbnail shows us the content of that page."
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