It’s surprising it hasn’t been done before, or at least by a leading company like Adobe; develop a set of programs for designing for the web that doesn’t require the ability or knowledge to write code.
It may be in the future that developing for the web becomes practically obsolete. It makes sense that you should be able to design for the web without code. It’s not often that you find people that can master both design and development.
Why should designers need to learn HTML or CSS? Designers lay out visually for print design in software such as Adobe InDesign, yet it comes to lay out a web design you are confronted with code. Even software such as Adobe Dreamweaver really doesn’t lend itself to designers and you find that your result does not work correctly on all platforms; you are required to learn to code to fix browser consistencies.
Here is the lowdown on Adobe’s new products:
Adobe Muse
This is the big one. Adobe Muse is a joy to look at; immediately after opening it you can compare it to InDesign. Simply drag elements on the page where you want them to be, it’s that simple. Click preview and you can test your new website immediately.
But how well does it work with how the web works?
As soon as you create a new document you are presented with options such as Page Width, Min Height, yes pages are scalable, Centre Horizontally and Columns.
In Plan view you can create a site structure with ease, it’s drag and drop! You also have master pages, create your layout on the master page and every new page you add automatically has the layout you want that you can change in a flash!
In Design view you can drag and drop numerous widgets on to the page, among them are Navigational Menus. Menus added to the page can automatically reflect the site’s structure with drop-out hover events if necessary.
It seems like everything has been thought of, but time will tell as users test out Adobe’s latest product.
You can download a beta version of Adobe Muse
Adobe Edge
Edge meaning cutting edge? If Muse was the InDesign of the web, Edge could well be the After Effects. Essentially mimicing Flash with support for the latest web technologies, you can create animated areas for your website without code and support the latest HTML5 web standards. This means that designers can easily create animations for the latest web browsers without users needing a plugin such as Flash Player to run them.
This is a great step for Adobe as Flash is slowly losing its place, part of it down to Flash Player not being available for Apple’s mobile and tablet devices.
You can download a preview version of Adobe Edge
The real question these products make us ask..
Are these product the designer’s saviour, or are Adobe trying hard to fix what has to stay as a code-oriented industry?