Microsoft Announces the Expression Family of Design Tools

Lately there has been a lot of speculation about Microsoft's work on codename Acrylic (formerly Expression), and how this new product is going to compete in the marketplace. Today Microsoft officially announced the Expression family of design tools at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005.

The announced products and their code names are:

• Expression codenamed “Acrylic Graphic Designer,” a painting, illustration and effects tool for creating graphic designs
• Expression codenamed “Sparkle Interactive Designer,” a user-interface design tool for modern application development using the Windows Presentation Foundation
• Expression codenamed “Quartz Web Designer,” a layout and design tool for creating Web sites.

Here's a little more information on each of these products from the Microsoft press release.

"Acrylic Graphic Designer" Key Features and Benefits

• Dynamic visual effects. Designers can explore their creativity with innovative styles and graphic properties such as textures, fringes and dimensionality. New image effects such as blurs, drop shadows, color correction and filters can be accomplished by using nondestructive, editable Live Effects. "Acrylic Graphic Designer" also includes advanced features such as PhotoMontage.
• Flexible hybrid graphics environment. Built-in flexibility enables designers to alternate between vector-based and pixel-based elements within a hybrid graphics environment.
• Easy hand-over from design to development. Users can easily incorporate graphics into a variety of other software tools and industry formats, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio and XAML.

"Sparkle Interactive Designer" Key Benefits and Features

• Rich visual design environment. The design environment of "Sparkle Interactive Designer" enables the combination of multiple media elements such as vectors, pixel images, 3-D content, video, high-quality text, and animation for rich, cinematic user interfaces. Content can be contextualized by applying custom styles and layout to assist end-user interaction and comprehension.
• Custom styles and adaptive layout. With the inclusion of adaptive layout for various screen resolutions and form factors, customers can combine visual styles into compelling new interface elements.
• Easy hand-over from design to development. XAML enables the translation of the graphic user interface into the code environment, fostering seamless collaboration between developers and designers. Prototype, design and development stages within the software development process are optimized through the sharing of a common platform and integration with Visual Studio.

"Quartz Web Designer" Key Benefits and Features

• Advanced Web site design. "Quartz Web Designer" enables the direct manipulation of positioning, sizing and padding with CSS page layouts. The flexible, designer-focused work space provides easy access to task panes, toolbars and features. In addition, the rich design-time experience combined with integrated design and code views helps to deliver differentiated Web sites.
• Standards-based design. Web designers can create accessible, standards-based Web sites by default and configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML and CSS standards as well as browser schemas. Built-in compatibility and accessibility checkers ensure that Web sites render properly in any browser.
• Easy hand-over from design to development. Support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML offers easy integration between Web design and development teams with "Quartz Web Designer" and Visual Studio.

More information about the Microsoft Expression family can be found at www.microsoft.com/expression.

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