It means that designers and developers are closely linked and have been since the dawn of time (or at least the mid-nineties) but that the crossover between these departments is not an easy thing to achieve - in fact the odds are firmly stacked against it on an almost Biblical level. Even when the resultant output works well and is functional and beautiful, one party or the other will probably want to take the credit for the success in spite of obstacles introduced by the other. The designer is beset by moody developers wrecking their designs with practicalities and the developer is constantly bemused by whimsical visual nonsensitudes (I have made this word up, there can be no lie - but I like it so much it's staying) imparted by the arty-farty time waster in the trendy sweater that simply wouldn't work in the real world.

Whilst obviously this isn't always the case and there's perhaps the bigger issue of collaborative design working practices to be discussed some other time, I think these scenarios go a little way to explaining the modern emergence of the Deseloper (you heard it here first people). These are the designers who have empowered themselves with coding skills enough to facilitate getting the job done themselves or the developers with a copy of Photoshop who take the time to tighten up their visual sensibilities. Boring things like web standards and better training/resources play a huge part in the success of the Deseloper - but as time goes by there are more and more software resources available to either side which establish this role as one with legs.

The latest in this arena is Adobe Muse which is a web design tool targeted squarely at the lazy Deseloper who has mastered the software used to create traditional print-based design and wants to make their own websites because they acknowledge it's unavoidable, but cannot really be assed to figure out how. In short it's for Graphic Designers who want to create websites without writing any code. It's only in Beta at the moment, and it's fair to say that it has been slated a bit in places such as Twitter for seemingly producing horrendously ugly code - but I wanted to take a look and see if it might act as a bridge between darkness and light and if it's flaws could be forgiven. The Muse public beta is currently available from http://muse.adobe.com as you might expect, and was made for Adobe's AIR environment rather than being a standalone application. The final release is slated for early 2012 and will be a subscription based situation with a monthly fee, which is probably how all Adobe products will be one day.

My first impressions are overwhelmingly good. I click to create a new site and the little window that opens looks like it's straight out of InDesign (familiar turf for most print based designers). Upon configuring things such as columns, gutters and whatnot you are given the choice between a simple but effective site-map screen where master pages are set and applied - and the design window itself. I've mocked up a site plan in about thirty seconds and now I'm ready to construct a master page layout using the tools and options that also closely resemble those in the rest of the Creative Suite. Manoevering page elements and selecting fonts and images is as easy as ever it was in Illustrator and even has the little touches such as smart guides and alignment lines automatically appear when you are shifting things about. Muse allows you to easily add a few menu types which are great, but took a lot of what I would consider to be mindless clicking around to figure out how to customise properly. Crossover support for Photoshop is excellent and scaling + positioning images was easy although I did notice upon export that my carefully optimised .png file was replaced with a hobnail boot of a .jpg. I imagine I would identify ways to fine tune those kind of options through further investigation - but if it did force that decision upon me, I would be a bit concerned about fidelity throughout a live project.

I played with MUSE for about an hour and a half and in that time I made this as a little test; http://49thfloor.businesscatalyst.com/index.html

Please feel free to look at the page source to ascertain what you think of the code (if that's your thing) - I wasn't exactly blown away with what it generated and it seems needlessly overblown and flabby. The biggest problem I could see though was that a separate css file was generated for each page - and it does appear to miss the whole point of what those standards guys have been trying hard to achieve for years? Having said that it looked okay on the various browsers I tried and so does it really matter? The resounding answer should be yes, but you'll have to take my word for it and I suspect that if as a lazy Deseloper you have managed to get what's in your head onto a browser window without learning about code, you'd see it as a complete success. Maybe the backlash from the code-savvy is based on the fear their positions may become redundant (dry your eyes, it's unlikely really isn't it) or just on professional snobbery, after all they DID bother to learn coding and standards and any cut-price, quick fix is bound to irk. Have you ever heard a designer deride something like MS Publisher or Corel Draw, it's the same thing really. The fact is that John and Jane from the middle-management team of average.inc probably couldn't tell the difference between a leaflet designed by the same person in Publisher or InDesign, but that doesn't mean there isn't a difference.

Working with Muse ultimately isn't that much easier than working in a conventional manner and it has a learning curve of it's own to overcome especially if you aren't already a CS veteran. The novelty of familiarity is soon offset against the idiosyncrasies of the code and I think for anything other than small or personal projects I really wouldn't feel comfortable in using or recommending it. I just get a nagging, sinking feeling whilst working and I've been stung this way before. Way back when, before CSS and standards and CMS and even before laptops really, I mastered Macromedia Flash. It was Flash 3 then and I loved it because all of a sudden you could make web pages in the same object oriented way that you might lay out a page design (sound familiar?). You could nudge, transform, rotate, place and animate your page to death and it was all so cool compared with the geeks and their HTML based tables and frames. Yuk. The trouble is that you don't get away with this workflow as soon as the pages start to increase or the client gets involved with their feedback you spend a lot more time in making it all work (plus everyone hates Flash now, so I'm glad I jumped ship when I did) than the HTML guys who might not boast some of the bells and whistles but would go on to win the race in every other way. Muse does the headline bit, but without learning some code you make things harder later on; analytics, forms, CMS, anything not 100% standard is out of bounds - and that's a real shame.

To all the Deselopers out there, this is the word of God; if you are going to cross the streams, show some respect to the waters into which you'll dip your toes before taking an easy solution - or be prepared to jump for joy when your peers and competitors are offered plaudits for designing in MS Paint and Publisher. And that would be bad.