Adobe doesn’t get it
Adobe’s new Muse is a product aimed at helping print designers design websites without coding.
There are two things wrong here. The first is the idea that print designers should be designing websites. The second is that you can design a website without coding.
This is a troubling development from a company that is trusted by so many, and, in certain ways, is an industry thought leader when it comes to providing designers with tools that help them do their jobs. This is Adobe signaling they believe in tools that abstract away craftsmanship and instead rely on outdated paradigms, returning to the heyday of WYSIWYG IDEs that lull you into a state of thinking anyone can put together a successful website.
But it’s not true. Yes, print designers can learn to design websites. And print designers can be really fantastic designers. Print designers can also learn to write HTML, and do it well. Muse, however, implies neither of those things are necessary. No, it says, you just keep doing what you’re doing and this magical piece of software will handle the rest.
In the video on the Muse website, one of Muse’s product designers says ‘In five or ten years, I don’t think very many people will be coding to design websites.’ (via Elliot Jay Stocks)
How wrong you can be – it’s far more likely the opposite will happen.
on August 15th, 2011 at 19:08 • Posted in Peers and Punditry, The Status Quo
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I agree 100% with what you have said. Part time, I teach the coding side of web design at a small college in northwest Ohio; HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. I do most of my labs/demonstration with Dreamweaver, not because I like it, but because I think it’s important for the students to get comfortable with their environment.
When Adobe does things like this, I start to think it’s time for colleges to move away from Adobe products, especially Dreamweaver.
by Scott Radcliff • Aug 15th 2011 • 21:08
I think the false presumption is that “coding” is necessarily more complicated than using a GUI. I’d love to see a way to descriptively layout and style web pages that’s easier on designer’s eyes than HTML and CSS.
by Ben Lenarts • Aug 15th 2011 • 22:08
Tools like Muse will be nice for the do-it-yourselfer who has no desire to be a full time web designer, but I agree that anyone serious about creating websites needs to learn to code.
However, industry trends aside, I wouldn’t say one approach is necessarily better than the other. You have to look at it from a historical perspective. If Tim Breners-Lee had envisioned the web as a binary format created by visual tools, we might’ve all been using an Adobe-like tool to create web pages today.
Nobody would argue that Photoshop is an incapable image editor. Yet, after 20+ years of industry use, you won’t find anyone with the title “Photoshop Developer.”
by EP • Jan 22nd 2012 • 20:01