Microsoft Expression Studio [OLD VERSION]

Other products by Microsoft

Product Features

• Suite of professional design tools and innovative technologies for wide range of design applications
• Expression Web: create the latest, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web
• Expression Blend: Create engaging, Web-connected, user experiences for Windows
• Expression Design: An illustration and graphic design tool for building compelling elements for both Web and desktop applications
• Expression Media: professional asset management tool for cataloging and organizing your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000OOCM0I
• Item model number: PJS-00001
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 21, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,019 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Amazon.com

The Microsoft Expression suite of professional design tools and innovative technologies will take your creative possibilities to a new level. Whether you are designing standards-based Web sites, rich user experiences on the desktop, or managing digital assets and content, Microsoft Expression applications will help. Microsoft Expression Studio includes the following products: Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Expression Media.

It's time to leap into the 21st century with an illustration tool designed by designers for maximum efficiency and minimum fuss.

Export both vector and bitmap artwork to XAML format, ready to use in Expression Blend to target the desktop or the Web.

Use Expression Design's powerful vector drawing and editing tools to explore new artistic possibilities. View larger.

Impress your audience with slide shows, videos, and Web galleries.View larger.

Generate elegant, modern CSS layouts with state-of-the-art surface design tools. View larger.

Expression Web: Superior Quality for the Web
Expression Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the Web. It helps you reduce complexity and ease data integration by offering a set of powerful design tools and task panes to quickly incorporate XML data. Expression Web lets you seamlessly integrate Web design and development teams with Expression Web and Visual Studio's superior support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML. Sophisticated CSS design features help you unleash your creative ideas and bring your Web sites to life with, while built-in support for today's modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility.

Expression Blend: Engaging Web Experiences for Windows
Expression Blend is the professional design tool that lets you create engaging, Web-connected, user experiences for Windows. With hit you can quickly get involved with the new wave of next-generation applications that blend the best of the Web and the desktop. Think of Expression Blend as your virtual playground. Mix and match design elements such as video, vector art, high quality text, animation, pixel images, and 3D content with a full toolbox of advanced controls and containers to create engaging, cinematic user interfaces. With Expression Blend, "better" will quickly become your operative word: better performance, better usability, better experiences. Expressions Blend will help your designs break out of the browser to leverage the full power of the desktop, and once that happens, there will be no limits to your design capabilities.

Expression Design
Expression Design is a professional illustration and graphic design tool that lets you build compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces. This application helps you to expand your portfolio and collaborate with others who are defining the next generation of software applications. Expression Design is the perfect companion to Expression Blend, letting you quickly build sophisticated vector assets and then seamlessly transfer -- by way of XAML -- your graphics to your Expression Blend projects. You'll quickly be able to unleash your creativity with innovative vector drawing tools and non-destructive effects that you can apply to either vector or imported bitmapped images, and apply both hard-edged and organic strokes while maintaining the flexibility of vector paths. Expression Design has been built from the ground up for designers by designers. In other words, you can work with the assurance that once you hand off your projects to the developers, they won't lose any design features. What you create is what your users will see and experience.

Expression Media
Expression Media is a professional asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation. Imagine how much more you'd get done if you could just find what you're looking for. Expression Media makes digital asset management easy -- just drag and drop to import more than 100 different media formats, including digital RAW files. Even when your originals are offline, Expression Media's visual catalogs allow you to browse, search, and annotate your assets. You can handle lots of files, and fast. Do you have hundreds of files to rename, convert, or tag? No problem. Expression Media includes a sophisticated batch processor that will do it for you. But better yet, Expression Media also helps you to deliver your assets to you client in the exact format your client needs them, whether you're delivering slide shows, videos, or Web galleries.

Product Description

Item #: 44920G. Microsoft Expression Acrylic Graphic Designer brings together the best of vector- and pixel-based capabilities, letting you explore new creative and cutting edge possibilities.Produce a variety of graphic visual effects using innovative styles and graphic properties such as textures, fringes, and dimensionality. Add blurs, drop shadows, color corrections, and other image effects and filters using nondestructive, editable Live Effects.Bring together the best of vector-based and pixel-based design with a flexible hybrid graphics environment. Incorporate graphics from other applications, and export design elements to a variety of software tools and formats including the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly code named "Avalon").Achieve professional results with a varied collection of highly customizable vector and pixel tools which provide powerful creative options for drawing, painting, and editing both new and existing content.

Product Description
Microsoft Expression Studio - complete package
Category: Creativity application
Subcategory: Creativity - desktop publishing, creativity - graphics & image editing, creativity - music or sound creation, creativity - video editing & production, creativity - web design / publishing
License Type: Complete package
License Qty: 1 workstation
License Pricing: Standard
Language(s): English
Platform: Windows, MacOS
Distribution Media: DVD-ROM
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars MS Expression Studio - In a word, WOW. This tool is growing on me!, April 15, 2008

By	Mark "Technology, Music and Movies" (East Coast) - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)

Microsoft Expression Studio

I am familiar with Visual Studio and .Net, have used it in several languages and different projects. And I also used Frontpage for a while, though I must admit I abandoned it quite a long time ago. So I was reintroduced to Expression Studio by way of being given a copy of Expression Web first Microsoft Expression Web Professional Design Tool. And while I think there is a much steeper learning curve with this product, I am very happy I stepped up to Expression Studio.

First of all, this type of product is going to have a somewhat limited audience. If you just want to create webpages, you should be looking to Expression Web or one of the competing products by Adobe, Macromedia and the like. I can honestly say that Expression Web has enough extras included in it to even create some light apps and easily achieve CSS type functionality.

Now, what if you need to build some front ends for web applications that require more in depth methods and detailed integration of components? Then THIS is the program for you. I am just getting my feet wet with it but they've brought a lot of cool components together here.

In addition to Expression Web, this also includes Blend, Design and Media.
Web - Design web pages and light apps
Blend - Integrate your web pages with web tools and parts
Design - Design graphic pieces easily to use on your pages / apps
Media - Catalog and retrieve your web applets for easy use on different projects

The Design tool is not an Adobe Photoshop level tool, but like all of the Expression Studio pieces it has some time-saving methods included to help you design common elements. Even though I use both Photoshop and Corel for different graphics stuff, this tool is still useful only for the speed of use it provides when it comes to those common picture and button elements.

Of course the Silverlight aspect is still just in its early stages, but so far I have seen a lot of cool stuff made with it. As far as the integration stuff, easier to do basic stuff than Flash. And what's also cool is that you can drill down to the code level and change things very easily. So those who are not hardcore programmers will no longer need to also get Visual Studio to make web apps.

The main con is really the [...] issue. This is about [...] more than the Expression Web product, which is the meatiest of the 4 included tools. There are lots of cool templates included with it. Unless you really want to create completely new templates, you will probably think the Studio product is overkill. Truthfully, many people will get most of what the need with Expression Web. There's no real way to know without trying them out. For me, I wanted to have the full Studio because I saw a cool demo of how to use it and I knew I could save some time with the Blend and Design components.

Like I said, still getting into this but so far I'm glad I did. I loved my Expression Web and now I'm loving this. Hopefully whatever kinks are there will be ironed out in short order.

If you want to try this before you decide on one or the other, you can download an evaluation copy from Microsoft. Just take my advice and work on it for at least 1 or 2 weeks befoe you decide. There's a lot of stuff in here that you should test out.

Enjoy!

4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ms Expression Suite, February 23, 2008

By	David Crowder "computer geek" (Rowlett,Tx) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Disappointed in overall product. The Web portion is improvement over FP (overall) The rest is still lacking. I see updat ($) to stay competative with the Adobe Design Suites which are , unfortunenly, vastly superior. and 2-3 times the price. MS, you let me down with this and Vista

1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Accessible?, April 27, 2008

By	Roy S. Miller (United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I purchased Microsoft Expression Studio specifically to design a website addressing the essentially total lack of accessibility in essentially all software ( and everything else from products to websites ).

This website in particular addresses accessibility for people with photosensitive and pattern sensitive epilepsy who have seizures triggered by blinking / flashing / scrolling / etc. content.

I purchased Adobe CS3 but I had accessibility problems that Adobe would not even respond to. ( this is after downloading all of the product manuals and looking at them carefully to see if the product was accessible before I purchased it ). So, over $1800 down the drain.

I then purchased MS Expression Studio. I was able to disable some of the more obnoxious features.

Unfortunately, it uses those particularly obnoxious progress bars ( the determinate ones that flash across the screen when you do something non-trivial ). These cause such bad seizures ( complex or simple partial ) that I am totally miserable using the product.

Microsoft is totally incompetent in this area. I have the identical problem with Visual Studio. As software projects evolve in size, I reached a point where these progress bars were appearing regularly and I had to give up on the project about 22,000 lines as I was overwhelmed by the seizures.

From what I am now seeing, I will have the same problem with Microsoft Expression - I will get to a point where the project gets too large and I can no longer maintain it.

You shouldn't use these progress bars unless a significant amount of processing time is required
1) There needs to be a user specified threshhold only after which a progress bar occurs ( I could set it to, say, 1 billion years ). ( One program, Bibleworks, has a similar implementation which makes it accessible )
2) Obviously, you like to know what is going on, if anything. A non-animated hourglass that appears, say, after one second ( this time could be user specified as well ) and a progress bar after, say, 10 seconds
3) A progress bar that only appears after a specified period of time and only updates at specified intervals ( say after 10 seconds and then every 10 seconds )

Microsoft: Accessibility is the LAW.

Try making all your products accessible ( currently none of them are ). Your software makes people sick, it disables them, it destroys their lives ( try Vista for lack of accessibility )

Additionally, there is a bug in the software that prevents ANY products from being unlocked ( it will not accept the product key for the rest of the studio )

So $500 down the drain. The rick get rich and the disabled get looted.

Accessibility is the law. It was until the Republicans came along ...