Muse: Create Websites Using an InDesign Interface

Meet at 7 p.m., Presentation at 7:15 p.m.

We are cutting the meeting preliminaries a bit this time since we need to vacate the premises by 9:30 p.m. rather than 10 p.m. If you want to hear it all, be on time. We don't start late.

West Los Angeles

Continuing the policy of holding meetings in various locations throughout the southland, this meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group will be held in the Rancho Park section of West Los Angeles, adjacent to Westwood and Cheviot Hills.

This Month’s Topic: Muse: Create Websites Using an InDesign Interface

This month you will learn about Muse, an Adobe application, now in beta, that allows designers to create websites as easily as creating layouts for print. One of the reasons Muse is a boon for us is that the user interface and way of working parallels working in InDesign! Design and publish original HTML pages to the latest web standards without writing code. Muse allow you to:

• Plan your project — Easy-to-use sitemaps, master pages, and a host of flexible, site-wide tools make it fast and intuitive to get your site planned out and ready for design.
• Design your pages — Combine imagery, graphics and text with complete control, flexibility and power (almost as if you were using Adobe InDesign).
• Add interactivity — Drag and drop fully customizable widgets like navigation menus and slide shows, embed HTML code snippets to include things like Google Maps, enable tool tips, rollovers and much more.
• Publish your site — Preview your site with Muse to see how it looks and test how it works. Then convert to a live website using Adobe.

Location and Parking

Getting to Community Room B

Community Room B is located on Level 3E at the western end of Westside Pavilion behind Landmark Theaters. If you ask someone for directions make sure you specify Community Room B because there is also a Community Room A, which is at the other end of the mall. The door to Community Room B is located on the west end of the overpass that connects Nordstrom’s to Landmark Theaters, on the south side of the overpass. You will walk through two doors to an exterior corridor which makes one turn to the right. Follow the signs.

Parking

The best place to park is in area G1-5 west of Westwood Blvd. Parking is a flat $3 for anyone attending an event in the Community Room. We are trying to get parking comp’d but I think it’s a long shot since parking isn’t handled by the mall, but is contracted out. Bring $3 just in case.

Agenda

7:00 p.m. - Meet and greet

7:10 p.m. - Welcome and announcements

7:15 p.m. - Presentation (with mid-presentation break)

9:00 p.m. - Raffles

9:30 p.m. - Goodbyes

Meeting Notes

By Alvin Takamori

The January meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group was held at the Westside Pavilion in a Community Room that was tucked away in a hidden exterior corridor. Somehow, about 70 intrepid people managed to find their way to this location.

Once there, our audience met our guest speaker Sharon Sachse, who introduced us to Muse, Adobe’s new website development software. Sharon does front-end development incorporating video, animation and rich interactive experiences for viewing on multiple devices. For this meeting, she showed us how to construct a simple website using Muse.

First, Sharon informed us that Muse is wrapped inside an Adobe AIR package. If you don’t already have AIR, it installs automatically with Muse. AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that enables web developers to build and deploy standalone web applications and context to be seen and used by multiple devices like smartphones, computers and televisions. Don’t worry, I don’t fully understand all of this either.

However, an important point that Sharon made was that your editing options have restrictions. If you take your Muse website and decide to edit it in another program like Dreamweaver or create any custom coding of the HTML, you won’t be able to go back to Muse. Muse will not recognize any outside changes that you made. So this is not a program that a sophisticated website developer, who wants to tweak every detail and add custom features would want. At least, not yet.

Muse is targeted at those of us who would rather not see any scripting or code. In the master page section of Muse, Sharon demonstrated how to quickly create a sitemap with the various pages and links. The order of the pages was easily changed by just dragging the image of the page where you wanted it. Then she created a header and a basic menu with the rollover and click-on states. Both features were applied universally to all the pages on the website.

Sharon inserted an interactive map and explained how you could also add videos. Then she built a gallery of images. The thumbnails could be displayed, repositioned and adjusted in a variety of ways. On a long page, she added anchors to scroll to specific sections. She also created a drop-down menu and a footer with links. There is also a library of widgets inside Muse.

The beauty of all of this was that Sharon created the website primarily with drag-and-drop and menus that an InDesign user would intuitively be able to use.

To publish the site, Muse integrates with Adobe Business Catalyst, but you also have the option to choose your own webhost.

Currently, Muse is available as beta software, so you can test it.

Raffle Prizes

SOFTWARE: one eDocker product. Value to $995.00
Your choice of ONE of the following: eDocker2, eDocker Tablet Publisher

SOFTWARE: one Adobe CS5.5 product. Value to $699.00
Your choice of ONE of the following: InDesign CS5.5, InCopy CS5, Illustrator CS5, Dreamweaver CS5.5, Flash Professional CS5.5, Flash Catalyst CS5.5

SOFTWARE: Markzware product. Value to $399.00
Your choice of ONE of the following: Q2ID plugin, ID2Q, PUB2ID, PageZephyr, FlightCheck

3-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION: Stock Layouts. Value $299.00
Full access to the entire Stock Layout template library for three months.

3-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION: Lynda.com. Value $112.50
Full access to all Lynda.com online training courses for three months including their new Muse course.

PUBLICATION: InDesign Magazine. Value $69.00

SOFTWARE: TypeDNA. Value $49.00

Raffle Prize Winners

Jeanie Lytle won TypeDNA font management software and Cathy Cassells won a three-month subscription to Lynda.com that should turn her into a software guru. Dallas Dorsett, Jeffrey Schimsky and Colleen Gates all took home Adobe T-shirts. Proving that if you buy multiple raffle tickets you can win multiple prizes, Jeffrey also won a gift from Art Beats and Colleen won an eDocker electronic publishing software product. Another multiple winner was Gary Mancoris who received a subscription to InDesign Magazine and stock photo downloads from Fotolia. Robin O’Connell also won downloads from Fotolia and Yumiko Yamada won access to the Stock Layout template library for three months. Joanne Abensour won her choice of a Markzware software product and Barbara Fier won Adobe Dreamweaver 5.5. In addition, a couple of concert ticket prizes donated on the spot by attending user group members went to Nelson Anderson and Mike Gonzales.

Congratulations to all the winners. With so many prizes the odds of winning were very good, but even if you didn’t win a something, everyone could have helped themselves to the free cookies.

Job Opportunities

We are looking for people who want to get involved with the administration of the group. Maybe you have web skills, newsletter skills, an eye for photos, want to conduct the raffles. Whatever. Let's talk.

Next Meeting

The next meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group will be held March 15, 2012 at 7 p.m. in the Community Room at a shopping center whose name and address are both called 8000 Sunset located in Los Angeles, CA 90046. 8000 Sunset is the big curved center located at the corner of Crescent Heights Blvd. that used to house the Sunset 5 Movie theaters.

Andrew Keith Strauss will speak on typography and OpenType helping to get you up to date on the latest typographic functionality in InDesign including (1) technological standards, including Unicode, OpenType and the Adobe Type Engine; (2) InDesign’s typographic features, especially the most useful ones that are hidden in plain sight; and (3) typefaces and type foundries, including some new designs and the independent foundries and type designers that produce them.

Andrew co-founded the original Los Angeles InDesign User Group in 2001. He is an Adobe Certified Training Provider, and has worked with a variety of publishers, design firms, advertising agencies and other customers over the years. He provides technical consulting, support and training in all aspects of publishing: from print to digital to online. Andrew is responsible for helping many prominent companies make the move to InDesign over the past 12 years, and even trained Adobe’s own staff in preparation for release of the original Creative Suite in 2003. Current concentrations include publishing to tablets and mobile devices, and the emerging HTML5 & CSS3 web standards. Two of his specialties are color theory and typography.

Thank You to our Sponsors

Here's a shout out to the meeting's facilitators:

Adobe
eDocker
Lynda.com
Artbeats
Stock Layouts
Fotolia
Markzware
InDesign Magazine
O’Reilly Press
Peachpit Press

New Sponsor

This month we welcome TypeDNA as a sponsor. TypeDNA is an Eddy-award-winning font-management tool and the only one that runs both standalone and within Creative Suite. It significantly enhances font capabilities and complements the design process for both Mac and Windows.

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