I’ve had a chance to play around with Expression Studio 2 Beta for about a week now and I can tell you there are some huge improvements in the new releases. Today I’m going to limit my scope to Expression Design 2 Beta. It’s only fair considering how harshly I criticized the first release of this program.

I have yet to experiment with the XAML part of this program so these observations are purely based on my experiences with Design 2 as a design program.

Pixel friendly

If you read my other posts on Design you’ll know that the first iteration of the program operated on a pixel-free basis meaning that it allowed you to export bizarre image sizes like 19.325 px and so on. Although this wasn’t a problem if you were designing vector graphics for vector applications, it was a huge pain if you were desiging for export to bitmaps. Well, those days are gone my friend. Design 2 not only works in pixels if you want it to, but it snaps to pixels as well so you avoid exporting white space.

Clean bitmaps

Another big issue I had with Design 1 was the horrendous quality of the bitmap exports from the program. When I first blogged about it, the Expression Design dev team actually contacted me directly because they couldn’t believe their own eyes. But sure enough, the program was mangling bitmaps to such a degree that they were pretty much useless. Well, once again the dev team listened and the new bitmap exports are crystal clear. I’ll post a new set of exports when I find the time but I can tell you right now that they are on par if not better than PhotoShop.

Effects outside the artboard

One weird thing about Design v1 was that the applied effects didn’t function outside the artboard. I guess it makes sense in some ways but for an Illustrator guy like myself it was just damn weird. And it did occasionally lead to problems. In Design 2, the effects are no longer artboard-bound which means you can create elements with effects, store them off the artboard and still see what you’ve done to them without having to drag them back in. You can also make crop areas outside of the artboard and export these elements to bitmap, XAML or whatever you want.

New exports

Whereas before you had to tur off the layers you didn’t want to export, you now have several export options in the export window. First off you can export everything visual on the artboard like you could before. The second option is Export Selected which lets you only export the currently selected element on the artboard on a transparent background. The third option is Export Slices which lets you export a series of slices in one click. Simple improvements that save a lot of time.

Sub-layer control

Coming from PhotoShop and Illustrator I found it incredibly annoying that you had no visibility and locking control on the sub-layers in Design. This has been fixed and you can now toggle visibility and lock on all sub layers independently. Again a sublte improvement that makes a world of difference.

So far the Design 2 experience has been a joyous one for me. I have yet to encounter any bugs and the program is more functional than the original. There are still things it can’t do but the inclusion of proper layered PSD importing makes these shortcomings less of an annoyance. I am currently desigining a new website using only Design 2 Beta and once it’s up and running I’ll give everyone a full run through of the experience.

For now I highly recommend getting the upgrade.

Finally, after weeks of designs and redesigns my second Expression-only project went live to the world last week. The site - for Vancouver based carpet retailer Colin Campbell & Sons’ new line called Nature’s Carpet - was entirely designed and coded using Expression Design and Expression Web (apart from the tacky Flash intro which was done in Flash). I think this site is far superior to my first Expression project iZufall.com because this time I knew of some of the pitfalls and I learned some valuable lessons on the way.

You might remember that I had a problem when exporting my Design elements for use in a html environment. Expression Design is a vector based program that does not constrain to true pixels. Coming from a PhotoShop environment I made the stupid mistake of eyeballing my designs when creating iZufall and by the time I discovered my error I was too far in to change things around. As a result there were some whitespace issues with the site.

Not so with Natures Carpet. This time I took the time to set all the margins and sizes using guides before starting on the actual design work. This requires that you know roughly what the site is going to look like but then all my designs start on paper so that’s not too difficult. With all my margins set beforehand it was easy enough to make and export graphical elements that fit snugly in my divs without creating unnecessary white lines where they shouldn’t be.

Unlike the iZufall project I chose to start this one completely from scratch: A blank html doc and a blank css doc. Such an endeavour would have been unthinkable in my pre-Expression days but knowing how powerful the css functionality in the software is I felt comfortable starting from scratch. Setting up all the styles was a tad tedious to start off with but once things got going it was quite pleasant. More than ever before I am now a big fan of anything CSS.

One of the neatest things I built for this site (if I may say so myself) was the nav bar on the left side. As you’ll notice when clicking around the entire nav bar is a simple list with tons of styling. It took me a while to figure out how to make the different levels work properly and how to make the current page appear selected all the time but in the end it all worked really well.

Due to lack of PHP and .NET support on the server side the site remains straight html at the moment but I designed the css code to be compatible with future database implementation so that any transition will be pain free.

I’ll post some examples of how I made the nav bar and current page selections work later on when I am in front of my own computer. For now take a trip around the site and see what you think. I’d love some feedback.

NaturesCarpet.com

Click here for a full screen version of this video.
Here (finally) is my second video in the Zufall series. It was meant to be a walk-through of the implementation process but then I ran across a small problem and decided to make a video about how I fixed it instead. Zufall part II about Expression Web is still on it’s way but this should tide you over.

In this video I demonstrate how I created the side buttons using Expression Design and how to do some quick alterations to the site in Expression Web using the fantastic CSS features. It’s quick and dirty but should give you a small glimpse of how to do things.

The reason why it’s taken so long for me to post a new video? Expression Media Encoder is damn near impossible to use! I’ll be ragging on this in a separate post once my head cools but just to give you a small taste it took 17 tries to get the video above to export to below the magic 22mb that is required for Silverlight streaming. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. But like I said, more on that later. For now I hope you get something out of my most recent video and be sure to check back for more.

It took way too long but now it’s here: My first video tutorial covering the overall design process of the iZufall.com website using Microsoft Expression Design. In the video I cover the overall design idea, how to import vectorized graphics form Adobe Illustrator and some other neat little things in the program.

Staying true to the Microsoft Expression experience the video is a Silverlight application hosted on Microsoft Silverlight Streaming. As you can see from my previous post I had some difficulties actually creating, uploading and posting the application but then a little bird tipped me off to this article that explains how to post Silverlight Streaming apps using iFrames and now it works splendidly.

So, without further ado, here is the first video. If you want a larger version to see all the small intricacies click here to openn a separate window. I advise you to do so so you can see what I’m doing.

Just a note: You’ll need to install the Silverlight RC plug-in to be able to play my video. It’s a small 2mb download that is completely safe, free and platform independent. You can download Silverlight by clicking here.

When I promised Microsoft I was going to use their new Expression Suite exclusively when designing my next project I wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into. A colleague put it quite bluntly: “Are you a masochist?” I don’t think so and after finishing the Zufall project I have to say my early fears were largely unfounded.

I will blog more extensively on the experience in using Expression Design and Expression Web to create this site (which by the way is for a neat little game called Zufall which is like a Magic 8-ball for your life) and create a couple of videos of the process so you can really see how these programs work and how I use them, but for now I’ll just leave you with some basic comments.

The entire site is based on a style sheet built from scratch using Expression Web. This is quite a milestone for me. In the past I’ve shied away from the CSS and often altered existing scripts rather than startig my own. But Expression Web’s ingenious live CSS functionalities make style sheet building a breeze and the result is rock solid (I hope). I had some issues with the classic Internet Explorer vs. the rest of the browsers when it came to margins, borders and such but I found a way of working around this using divs (something that is surprisingly easy in this program).

As I’ve mentioned before there are some issues with exporting from Expression Design. The bad edges and artifacting problem is persistent and as a result all the graphics on the page are huge lumbering PNG files rather than small nimble JPGs (thus the slow load speeds). I managed to work my way around the worst of it by putting some lines behind the logo (see image) but you can still see the rough edges if you look closely. It is worth noting that upon hearing of my exporting problems Microsoft contacted me and asked for my files to see if they could reproduce them. The are currently working on fixing the exporting problems and it will be interesting to see if they are able to solve them for the next build of Expression Design.

Another problem I’ve mentioned before is that Expression Design lets you export ridiculous sizes that don’t actually exist. Because Design is a vector based program it doesn’t conform to standard pixel widths and that means that if you’re not careful (i.e. if you do what I did) you end up designing a page with graphics that don’t really fit. This causes some annoying problems that will anger picky people like me best illustrated by the two grabs I’ve attached here. Notice how there is a small line between the curve graphic and the rest of the page? Or the line between the button and the white area? These were both caused by Design exporting graphics that were for instance 124.39 pixels wide. Of course the .39 does not compute in any rational sense when it comes to the web so lines appear. To remedy this problem one has to be very careful when laying out the designs so everything works on a pixel-by-pixel basis (or design the whole thing for Silverlight).

Take a moment and visit the site (www.izufall.com) to see how it looks on your computer and drop me a comment if you find anything you like / wonder about / hate / think doesn’t work.

More to come…

NOTE: I’m going to start saying Color Dropper instead of Color Picker.

After the email I got from Dan at Microsoft I went back to retest the color dropper issue I found yesterday. Here are my results:

Dan told me that while the color dropper in the normal tools panel is an “object colour picker” the one in the bottom corner of the swatch area is a “screen colour picker” and that my problem probably occurred while using the latter one. This is because the screen color dropper uses the native colour profile of the computer rather than a forced one like Adobe’s software does. Some testing proved this to be true: When I used the color dropper in the tools panel the colours matched while when I used the one in the swatch panel they caused the same problems as before. I take this to mean that since I use the Pantone Huey and therefore have a properly calibrated monitor the screen colours Expression Design perceives are off from the originals. That makes absolutely no sense to me but at least we now know the reason for the problem.

But this, as my old philosophy professor used to say, begs a question: If screen calibration equipment and their colour profiles cause Expression Design to misinterpret colours what is the point of having the swatch color dropper at all? One would assume that this software is directed primarily towards professionals and a lot of us use calibration equipment to avoid colour problems in our projects. This “feature” if that is what it is makes the color dropper useless. I also noticed something else that is even more confusing: In the Options pane you can actually force your tools panel color dropper to use that same useless screen colour rather than the actual colour.

At the end of the day (literally - it’s 7:43pm) I am left with one burning question: What exactly am I supposed to use the screen colour for? Especially when I have the option of picking the true colour with the tool panel color dropper?

A side note: It took me a couple of seconds to figure out how to use the tool panel color dropper because it doesn’t work like what I was used to nor as the swatch color dropper. While the ‘norm’ is to select the item you want to change the colour of and then use the color dropper to pick the colour the tool panel color dropper works quite literally like a dropper: You go to whatever object contains the colour you want, click and hold the mouse to “suck up” the colour and “drop” it into the object you want to change the colour of. If you just click on the original colour nothing happens. Confusing as hell.

I’ll write a post on this and other non-standard button and object functions later on when the list grows large enough to warrant one. In the meantime be advised that Design does not work like other programs.

Last week I posted an article where I complained about a few things in Expression Design. Some of my claims were questioned by Microsoft and I’ve found that on one count I was actually wrong (well, sort of wrong anyway). I’m a stickler for details and I think it’s important that everything said here is correct so here goes:

Vector Effects
In my post I claimed that the effects didn’t always work when you started messing around with the vectors. I stand by the fact that when I was working with the program I experienced this exact problem but I have been unable to reproduce the issue so therefore I say I was wrong pending further investigation. I have altered my original post to reflect this new development.

Deleting Sub-Layers

I also described an annoying issue caused by the inability to select individual objects under a layer through the layers pallet. I realize I was not clear in my description of the problem I was experiencing so let me clarify: Yes, you can select individual objects through the layers pallet but there are two vital functions that are not available but need to be:

1. You can’t toggle each object visible/invisible - this function is only available per layer. In my case this forces me to make new layers for each object and kind of defeats the purpose of the sub layers. Might be just me being old school but that’s the way it is.

2. You can’t select an object under a layer and delete it using the trash can function. If you do you end up deleting the whole layer. To delete one object alone you have to select it and then use the Del button. I find this very annoying, probably because I’m used to being able to delete objects individually from Adobe Illustrator.

These two features should be added to the program simply to make it easier to use and accommodate old Illustrator geezers like myself.

After my post on the color picker issue last night I got an email from Dan at Microsoft with a possible explanation:

I have a couple of questions that might help narrow down the issue:
- Are you using the “Color eyedropper” on the color picker? This one picks the screen color. There is another “Color dropper” on the tool bar that picks the object color and is likely to give you better color fidelity in color correct environments.
- Are you using a system color profile? On Vista, under Control Panels, there is a control panel called Color Management. Could you check if you are using a custom profile other than sRGB?
The drawing surface of Expression Design uses the system color profile by default. Programs like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator ignore the system color profile unless you specifically turn on proofing.
There is also another known bug with the Color eyedropper where it records colors by one digit (so 255, 0, 0 would be recorded as 254, 0, 0). This however, does not seem to be what you are seeing.

I was using the Color eyedropper when the error described in my earlier post occurred. But even if this dropper picks the screen colour it is still very inaccurate because the colour picked doesn’t match the screen colour either.

I am using a system color profile generated by Pantone’s Huey device.

I am not at my regular computer at the moment but I will check all of the above later on today to get to the bottom of this. Stay tuned …

The color picker in Expression Design is so inaccurate it’s pretty much useless!

Now that I got your attention let me explain: I was working on the Zufall project when I discovered that the colours of several of my elements didn’t match. I found this to be very odd as I had made a sort of colour pallet to start off with and used the colour picker to match all the colours to one another. Upon closer inspection I was mortified to discover that the colour picker wasn’t matching colours at all. It was generating seemingly random shades (or in some cases hues) of the colour I was picking. I tested it with several different colours and found that there are only two colours that stay the same when “picked”: black and white. All other colours are violated in some way or other.

Testing the Problem
To figure out what was going on I created a project with a table like set of boxes: Original colours on the left, picked colours on the right. I chose all the original colours from the standard colour swatch in Expression Design, copied the box and put the copy to it’s right and picked the colour from the original box. As you can see from the graphic below (exported as a PNG to avoid the artifacting problem I’ve discussed earlier in the blog) There is a distinct difference between the original colours and the picked ones. The reds and yellows seem to get “weaker” while the blues change all together. You’ll notice that the picked version of the dark/indigo blue looks more like the original purple than it’s parent. And no, I didn’t accidentally pick the wrong colour here. This is the result you get every time.

My Theory
It seems to me that the colour picker has a tendency of leaning to the left in the colour spectrum so that reds become oranges, oranges become yellow, yellows become green, greens become blue, blues become indigos, indigos become violets, and violets become red. Why this is happening is beyond me but regardless it is a problem that must be addressed. With a dysfunctional colour picker the whole program is in big big trouble.

The Proof

So I wake up this morning to discover that Microsoft has taken an interest in my blog (undoubtedly because I posted this blog on one of their forums). Anyway, they responded with some pointers, questions and disagreements. I realized that some of what I had said required some backing up in the form of actual screen grabs and examples so I’ve spent some time making illustrations to prove my point.

The biggest and most annoying issue I found when working with Expression Design was the poor quality of the exports. This was questioned by people from Microsoft so I’ve compiled some exports for your viewing pleasure. These images were all exported with whatever settings are listed underneath, then opened in Adobe Photoshop (where the strokes and text were added) and exported again from Photoshop using quality 12 and Standard compression. The graphic in question is the logo I’m currently working with for a web project. The logo (vector graphic) was imported as an EPS into Expression and resized to fit the frame. The bad rasterization is prevalent no matter what size the graphic is.

A series of exports side by side with no compression or re-sizing:

At normal resolution you can clearly see the stepped or frayed edges on all the Expression Design exports, especially pronounced along the horizontal elements in the ‘Z’ and the bottom left hand curve of the ‘u’. You’ll also notice that the green in the three top images seems slightly muddied and the white has a yellow tint to it. This is caused by the artifacts. The Adobe Photoshop exports are much better even at lower qualities.

To really show what the problem consists of I’ve blown up each of the above:

It’s quite obvious even to an untrained eye that the JPG compression from Expression - even at full resolution - is quite bad. Notice in particular the artifacts in the green and white areas of the quality 12 image. Likewise the edge-stepping is very pronounced making it hard to use the graphics. The difference in quality between Expression Design JPG at quality 12 and Adobe Photoshop JPG at quality 10 is also staggering, especially when it comes to artifacts around the edges and in the white. The artifact problem becomes even more pronounced when using gradients rendering the exported JPGs virtually useless.

I guess one could argue that the JPG compression is better using Photoshop because Adobe has been in the business longer and has had more time to perfect the science of compression. But that is beside the point. Microsoft intends to take over at least some of the market currently dominated by Adobe so it is vital that they get “simple” issues like this right right away.