One design trend that seems to have taken the web by storm over the last few months is long-scrolling sites. These sites, the most well-known being the New York Times’s Snow Fall project, use advanced HTML5 and CSS techniques to tell stories (or put marketing copy) on a single site with plenty of visual effects. Adobe Muse, Adobe’s Creative Cloud-based visual web design tool, started to embrace this trend in its last few updates and today, its latest version adds a few new tools that make building these sites easier.
Adobe says today’s release “includes top-requested enhancements for creating scroll motion effects that work on desktop and mobile devices.” This means, for example, it’s now easier for designers to experiment with scroll effects through a new — and imaginatively named — Scroll Effects panel. These effects are also now more tightly integrated into the rest of the application’s tools, so you can, for example, create a persistent menu that updates automatically as you scroll down a page (check out the video below for what this looks like).
With this update, Adobe says, these effects now also work significantly smoother on tablets and smartphones, thanks to improvements in the code that the tool automatically generates when you publish a site.
While the scroll motion effects are clearly the highlight of the release, an Adobe spokesperson also told us that this new version now features the ability to use Muse Forms with any hosting provider that supports PHP (that’s virtually all of them), as well as in-browser editing of Adobe Muse-generated sites hosted with Adobe and a new layers panel. The tool also now supports vertical text.