Google Launches Web Designer, A Visual Tool For Building Interactive HTML5 Sites And Ads
Google today announced the launch of Web Designer, a new tool for building interactive HTML5 sites and ads. The company first hinted at this launch in June, but had been quiet about it ever since.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has previously experimented with simplified web-authoring through its Web Page Creator and brought advertising formats closer to web widgets with Gadget Ads. Web Designer joins those strands by putting interactive site and ad production in one visual workflow.
The launch also enters an HTML5-animation tooling market where Adobe had already introduced Adobe Edge as a move away from Flash-era production tools. Coverage by DoubleClick Advertiser Blog, 9to5Google, and The Next Web indicates the announcement reached both advertising and web-development audiences.
First-order effects
- Google gives web creators and advertisers a Google-backed visual tool for producing interactive HTML5 sites and ads, reducing the need to hand-code every interaction.
- Web Designer becomes a new entry point into Google's advertising ecosystem for designers building rich ad units.
Second-order effects
- Adobe Edge faces a directly comparable Google alternative for HTML5 animation and interactive creative work, increasing competition for designer adoption.
- Agencies and advertisers can standardize interactive creative around HTML5 assets that serve both web and advertising use cases, rather than treating rich ads as a separate production workflow.
Third-order effects
- If visual HTML5 tools gain traction, rich-web production shifts further from proprietary plug-in workflows toward browser-native creative assets shared across publishing and advertising.
- Google's participation ties authoring tools more closely to ad-platform strategy, making control of the creative workflow another point of competition among web-platform providers.
The trend: Interactive advertising and web design are moving toward visual, browser-native HTML5 tools as alternatives to plug-in-based rich-media production.