Adobe Muse / Visual Arms
Visual Arms provides small and midsize businesses with a professional design alternative to the agency model. Steve Harris offers creative and technical services from identity to digital marketing to web stats tracking. See the website ›
Populate your content with precise positioning
The Visual Arms site shows how creativity need not be sacrificed for clarity and simplicity. Each page uses a similar layout but swaps images and other page elements to suit the needs of the content at hand.
A site that presented this content in a less structured way would feel cluttered, but Visual Arms takes advantage of master pages and positioning tools in Adobe® Muse™ software to define a layout that is content rich but nevertheless easy to digest and navigate.
Use swatches to keep your color crisp and precise
The Visual Arms site design makes artful use of gray shades plus a vivid orange as an accent color and a subtle blue as a secondary accent.
Maintain the integrity of your color palette in Adobe Muse by using a panel familiar to users of other Adobe Creative Suite® products: the swatch library. Add, delete, and edit swatches directly in Adobe Muse to keep colors organized.
Make rounded corners, shadows, and glows directly in Adobe Muse
The images at the top of Visual Arms' pages have a small dark drop shadow on the right and bottom, as do the quick links in the site's footer. The quick links also use a combination of rounded and unrounded corners.
It's easy to experiment with effects like these in Adobe Muse. Select an object and check out the options in the Control panel to play with rounded corners, drop shadows, and glows.
Layer and arrange the stacking order of objects
The design for Visual Arms layers images and text to great effect, with background patterns and shapes that add interest without being overwhelming.
In Adobe Muse, you can arrange objects in any order you choose by using commands like Object > Bring Forward and Object > Send Backward. Play with a variety of images, text, and shapes to find the layer order that works best for your design.
