Lessons

Lesson Info

Leveraging the CC Libraries Panel

All right, so we've got our form, that's good. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna talk a little bit about Creative Cloud Libraries. I just wanna show you these, because these can be really, really useful in Muse. Now if you are doing a lot of content, and you're maybe working with Illustrator and all kinds of programs, why don't you come to the home page? And I'm gonna choose View, Fit Page in Window. And maybe you are creating icons or logos or different things like that, and you wanna bring that content in to this program. Well, we can do that a couple of ways. We already saw, we saw we can copy paste, we saw that we can bring in Illustrator files and Photoshop files, I showed you that, or at least I mentioned it. We can also use the Creative Cloud Libraries, the CC Libraries Panel it's called. If you look on the right over here, you should see 'em by default. If you don't, you can come onto the window menu and choose CC Libraries. There they are right there. Now if you've ever...

worked with Creative Cloud Libraries, as a Creative Cloud subscriber or member, you have access to these, okay? Now your work might not support it, I'm not sure how that works. Some workplaces don't support services that Adobe has. But if you have access to these, and you've used them before, then they're the same thing as in other applications. InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc. They work pretty much the same way. The idea here with Creative Cloud Libraries is that we can take content, vector content, raster content, text, styling, colors, all kinds of things, all different assets that we wanna be able to save and reuse, even between pages of Muse, or sites of Muse, or between Muse and Photoshop, Muse and Illustrator, we can use the Creative Cloud Libraries panel to do it. So when you start, you can actually create a series of libraries. Now, I've got a lot of libraries. I do it, you can create these based on, I don't know, projects you're working on, or clients you're working with, whatever it happens to be, you decide. If you wanna create a library, and that's what I'm gonna do, you come to the bottom of that menu, yours might be short. You're gonna see Create New Library Now click on that. I can say, like, Muse Class or something like that. I'll create it. It's gonna be in there forever until I delete it. But if I click Create, it's gonna be blank. And you might have seen this blank already, because you may not have used these before. But if it's blank, we can do this. We can take content, like I could take this button right here, and just drag it in and let go. You could take content like this group of content, which is not really a group, but I could drag across this content to select it all, and if I don't want the image, it's like every other Adobe application, if you wanna de-select something, you can shift click on it. So shift click on the image. I've got that stuff selected, I could just drag that in there. So we've got a lot of things we could do here. Now the really cool thing about CC Libraries with Muse is if we wanna re-use that content, we just drag it out. So, you want another button somewhere, I'm just gonna take this button right here and just drag it out onto the page. And what I love about it is all of the functionality is still there. If you drag a menu that you created into the libraries panel, all of the functionality is still there when you drag it out. That's actually pretty cool. You will find though that things like break points, stuff that you set that way, as far as responsive, won't necessarily save, okay? At least break points won't. If we are working like I said with Illustrator, and maybe, let's go to the portfolio, or no, not portfolio, let's go to the team page, how about there? I wanna put a little icon up top here, like a logo. And in the final version, I actually have a header and a little bit of text there. But I'm gonna go over to Illustrator, and if you wanna do this too, you can. You can also if you don't have Illustrator or access to it, you can just place another image, like an icon or something like that. But if you go over to Illustrator, lemme open it up. I already have this asset open. I'm gonna use this one, okay? Now if you open up an Illustrator file, you need to have access to Creative Cloud Libraries to kind of follow along with what I'm doing. If not, you can just, you can watch, it's okay. In Illustrator, in Photoshop, in InDesign, in all these programs, you're gonna have a palette, or a panel, called Libraries, or CC Libraries. In Illustrator, it's called Libraries. And if I go in there and look, I can see the same library I just created in Muse. And there's the stuff. If I wanna use it, I can drag some of it out. It's not all gonna work perfectly, because some of it's geared towards Muse. So it might come in a little differently. But if I wanna use vector content, like this logo or this icon I'm creating, I can just select it, I can drag it over. There's a bunch of ways to do this actually. Add it, I'll call it, you can name it by double-clicking on the name below the thumbnail. I'll call it like logo or whatever. As soon as it sinks with the Creative Cloud, I'm gonna go over to Muse again. And there it is. If I wanna use it, I just drag it out. Click to place it on my page. It is vector content, which means created in, you know, shapes, Illustrator, that type of thing. I'll just scale it a little bit, put it up here. Of course, I'm gonna have to check and do all the responsive stuff, 'cause I did it all first, right? Silly me. Here's something that's really pretty cool. You notice how I've got this here now, what I wanna do is I wanna move these two objects down. In responsive design, this happens all the time in Muse. You forget, you're like oh, I needed to add a section up here, or do something, or move things around a little bit. But instead of having to select everything, and drag it all down, 'cause you might have a page that's like a mile tall, right? This is the easy way. Click on the topmost object that you wanna move and have everything below it move down. You can then, see this blue double arrow, this is called the vertical move handle. You can just drag that handle and everything that's even with this object, and below it, everything below it, will move down. That way we've got a little more room there. I can put the logo. I can actually come in here now and say let's, what would I do with this? I wanna keep it in the center, right? So I'm gonna pin it to center, and it's going to scale every image, every object that I put out here is going to scale. I wanna say no, at least not in this case. So I'm gonna say no don't. And then, look at it, and there we go. Now, do you notice here, watch. Bam. I went to a smaller break point, and where's the head? Okay? It looks like it's not there. So one thing we can do, if I click on that object, this is once again, these are the troubles you're gonna have if you actually already put in, if you already check the width for the design and all that, and you put in break points. And then you start adding more content. One thing I found is that it might actually be easier to take one of the break points you have, or those break points, delete 'em and start again, to be honest. But what we could do is I could take that head and go to Object. And you'll see we have Show All in Breakpoint, Hide in Other Breakpoints, and we can Copy the size and position. That's what I wanna try. I wanna copy the size of it, and the position, in the other breakpoints to see if that does it. There we go. I wanna make it uh... Nope, still not doing it, there we go. So, it's probably hanging out somewhere. It might be way up here. Lemme see where it is. I actually don't see it out there. That's crazy. Um, what I might do, honestly, is come out to this break point right here, like I said before, and delete it. If you guys, if you come out to a break point, and you actually do this. If you right-click on it, like at the bar at the very top, you're gonna see that we have Add, you even have Breakpoint Properties you can set. There are a few other things you can do. Or Delete. If you delete a break point, you're gonna start again. You're just gonna go back to your largest size. You're gonna run into this stuff. You will, I guarantee it. It's gonna be like, well where did it go, what's happening? You need to do that sometimes, so... All right, instead of me going through that, I just wanted to tell you that sometimes you need to do that. Sometimes you need to delete the break point and just start again. Do all of it again. Drag the gripper, make it narrower, do all that kind of stuff. The great thing, let me get back to CC Libraries here, the great thing about CC Library Content is that if you select it after dragging it in, go look in the Assets panel over there, and you're gonna see that the assets listed there, listed by the name, and there's also a cloud icon now. It is actually linked to the Creative Cloud Library. So if you edit that object in the original application like Illustrator, it will update. Which is pretty cool, you can do that. So if I come to CC Libraries, and I come to this object right here, I know, and look, it says created in Adobe Illustrator. There's actually a little tool tip that shows up. It knows where it was created. If I double click on it, I can go to Illustrator, I can select that object, for instance, and make a change. You know, let's say let's make it blue or gray or something like that. I'll go like that. I save it. Take a look over there in the Libraries Panel in Illustrator, it just updated. I can close it, I don't have to, I can close it. And then if I go back over to Muse, you're gonna see, now it's not gonna immediately update, it's gonna tell me that it needs to be updated. So you have to go to the Assets panel, and you'll see it's got a little update icon. I know it's really hard to see there, but it's like a little yield sign on top of this cloud. If I right click on it, I can say Update Asset. And there we go. So linking and working with Creative Cloud Library content is just, it can be a real life-saver, honestly. And the fact that you can use this content between the pages in your site is actually really cool. Or within sites or other sites that you're working with.