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Using Expression Design and some .NET 3.0 training

I've been up preparing the catalog of training courses for this year at Ilitia. I had to prepare a small A4 flyer to show up in events and clients, and I decided to give Microsoft Expression Design a try. Thus, I had to download and install it on my Vista laptop. Everything went fine.

The tool itself seems much better than previous beta's or ctp's and it ran flawlessly to create the sample flyer I needed. Anyway, I've seen some strange things that are more complicated or hidden than in other design suites (Freehand, Corel Draw, Illustrator or Fireworks):

  • It took me a lot of time to figure out how to create text inside a shape (rectangle in my case) because it's called Adapt Text To Path. To me that means to draw a path and put your text over it, adapting to the path. This was a bit hidden.
  • Although it seems possible to export to EPS format, it's not available to import files in EPS format. This is a must!
  • I had an strange error when using the drop tool to get a color from the screen. It completely crashed the application, but I was unable to repro it.
  • Exporting your design as PDF has some errors... if you have some text layers over shape layers, it wouldn't raster your text into the PDF. To solve this I had to convert all the text to paths and then export to PDF.
  • The fill tools are not intuitive. I need some time to figure how to create a gradient for a shape.
  • The fill with texture tool is not really complete, there are not too much patterns to add as textures to shapes and I mean really used patterns like dots, lines, etc.

Anyway I think this tool would have a great potential, because it seems it's getting mature. Don't know when it's supposed to be released to market but I'll try to provide this feedback to Microsoft, so they can see if it's something they can improve. This is how it looked while designing the flyer I linked to before:

posted on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 1:02 AM

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