Microsoft Expression Design

Expression Design, the product formerly known as Acrylic or Creature House Expression, ships as part of the Expression Suite – which is touted as competition to Adobe’s Creative Suite. It’s a vector graphics tool, suited to producing content for Microsoft’s Web tools Expression Blend and Silverlight.
Design’s interface will be familiar to Illustrator users, with a large artboard view, toolbox and Action bar (Control/options bar). A properties panel holds the equivalent to the colour picker, filter list, a well-stocked brush/stroke gallery and some of the transform tools.
The layout is completed by the layers panel, which operates in the standard industry fashion. The properties and layers panel can also be set to float on the artboard, but some features can be hard to find, hidden within these panels rather than in a menu bar. For example, only by clicking on a colour value can you activate a pop-up offering five colour models.
Bitmap images can be imported and files like BMP, TIFF and certain other industry formats are supported. PSD files are handled, but layers can’t be edited.

The main draw for this application is the ability to save artwork out as a XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) file. This is the format used by Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the application development platform designed by Microsoft and pre-installed in Windows Vista as well as other .NET Framework 3.0 technologies. It’s also used in Expression Blend, the Web development component of the suite.