Organize Content with Layers
Brian Wood
Lessons
Class Introduction
03:46 2What Muse Can Do
03:30 3Getting Started with your Document
22:18 4Adding Master Page Elements
16:23 5Organize Content with Layers
04:23 6Introduction to Responsive Design
18:19 7Adding Images and Working with the Asset Panel
27:22 8Adding Text and Creating Styles
21:01Advanced Text Styling
11:25 10Apply Effects
05:19 11Adding Links
27:30 12Adding a Button and Working with States
09:20 13The Power of Widgets
17:29 14Adding and Formatting a Contact Form
20:46 15Leveraging the CC Libraries Panel
10:31 16Adding HTML Content
05:11 17Final Testing and Publishing
11:12Lesson Info
Organize Content with Layers
Layers? This isn't gonna take a long time, because with layers, if you know layers in InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, you have an idea of what they work like in here. Now as we work in Muse, as we start to add content, things are gonna be stacked one on top of another. As a matter of fact, if I take this box right here, now don't do this, just watch me for a second, and I go up here and put it over that, look what it's doing. It's on top of those objects, okay? Now I'm gonna just drag it back down here, that's fine. If we want to, we can work with layers. Layers allow us to separate objects, content, whatever you wanna call it, into sort-of like transparent folders. So you can actually have these folders that you can see through if you look through 'em, and you can have different objects in each folder. And each folder is called a layer, okay? If you look on the right, you're gonna see the layers panel. By default, we have one layer. And what I wanna do is, I wanna name this. We're g...
onna call this the master layer, 'cause this is gonna be our master content. I tend to make layers depending on what kind of content it is. Maybe it's master page content, maybe it's the page content, etc. So to name a layer, double-click on the name, and you can just name it Master or something like that. You can change colors, and that's gonna change, if you look at the boxes and different things out there, they're blue right now, the edges of them. That's the layer that it's associated with. You can actually change that color if you want to. Just click okay. All right, now what we're gonna do later is we're actually gonna add a lotta different page content. We're also gonna add some other types of content. So we're gonna make some layers for those. That way we can kinda keep things separated. And if we want the master content, like let's say we have this header stuff, later on we decide to have it stick in place. And as we scroll the page, the page content's gonna scroll like this. Well I don't want the scrolling page content to go over the top of the logo, right? So what we might do is we might actually have the page content be beneath all of the master content. In this case, we're gonna need to make layers to do that. So we put all the page content on another layer for instance. So let's make the layer and get it ready. Now, you guys, you're gonna have to remind me that we're using these. Because if you set up layers, it doesn't mean you're gonna use 'em. You have to remember that you're using them. You'll just stick on one layer and it'll put everything on the same layer and you'll forget later on. And there it goes. All right, so to make a new layer, click on new layer, double-click to name it, call it, you know, page content or something like that. There we go. You can change color, that's fine. Click okay. Now this layer doesn't have any content, and the great thing about layers too is you can turn off, by clicking on this little eye, you can turn off the stuff for a layer so you can see what your focus, or looking at, or focus on certain things. You can lock content if you want in this little area here. I want the page content to maybe go behind the master content. Maybe, we'll see. But I'm gonna drag the page content layer down, and you can re-order these layers. And right now it's not gonna make a bit of difference, because there's nothing on the page content layer. But all of the master content out here will be above the page content, which is great. That's something we really want, okay? All right, now, if you want to you can delete layers and it will delete all the content. If you have content already out here, look at the master layer, for instance. Click on the arrow to the left of master and it will show you all the objects. What I love about this is you could come out here, and see the little box to the far right here? You could click on that little box and it will actually select the object out there and show you what it's talking about. It's like oh, well that's that, okay, that's great. You can even drag these objects in a different ordering if you want, just by dragging them within the layer. If I click on an object, maybe, that type of thing. No it's not gonna let me do that right now, 'cause this stuff is selected. That's fine. Yeah, for some reason it's not allowing me-- there we go. Now I can drag it and you can see, you can actually re-order content within if you had objects stacked on top of each other, for instance. All right, there's a lot of ways to work with layers. Wanted to give you a heads up, just a starting point. We're gonna keep it simple, we've got two. And next thing we're gonna do, we've got a little bit of page content out here now, or at least some master content. We're gonna start to work with responsive web design.
Ratings and Reviews
MikeD
This is part 2 of a 3 part course covering basics, fundamentals and some advanced properties. The three programs combined make a complete course in Adobe Muse. I am very pleased someone finally made a decent and complete course in how to use use Muse. As a photographer who has fairly simple needs for for building and maintaining a website, I needed something much less complicated than Dreamweaver. Brian Wood does an excellent job as he usually does. He is very detail oriented and he speaks technically to most operations within a program. He does work a little too hard at dumbing it down, but he is much better than those that skip over the details or those ewho don't even know the details. If you want to learn Muse, I highly recommend this course, in fact, all three parts.
wendy fite
Very efficient introduction to the basics in Muse. I did the Muse CC Quick Start course and then followed up with this Muse course on the fundamentals. This course is a little more technical that the quick start. Both courses give you what you need to do a website. The fundamentals talks briefly about HTML,JavaScript, etc.; while the quick start course does not. Recommend this class for using Muse for web design.