I bought Expression Studio 3 a while back – it’s really not bad at all. Expression design is not up to Adobe Illustrator standards by any means but for my purposes it’s very serviceable. Personally the only feature I really found myself wishing for after using Illustrator is the gradient mesh. Fingers crossed for gradient mesh support in Expression Design version 4…

I designed the new Rowan Beach logo and web site graphics with Expression Design – it only took a few hours to get something looking half decent even though I was pretty new to the software (and some would say challenged from a design perspective) – the software is a lot simpler than Illustrator which makes it faster to pick up and use. Partly that’s because it doesn’t have the same feature set as Illustrator but I think it’s also because it’s new software with the benefit of a clean, fresh UI design.

Expression Blend is great for laying out Silverlight / WPF application screens (I’ve been using it mostly for Silverlight really) although it sometimes does nasty things to the XAML (e.g. it often adds negative margins all over the place when you surround something with a different layout container). If you stay in split view and keep an eye on the XAML that is being churned out it really works quite well. Overall I still tend to do a lot of layout in the visual studio XAML editor though  - the better auto-complete support with Resharper is great and being able to hit Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D to quickly reformat the XAML is very handy. I find that I normally swap back and forth between Visual Studio and Expression Blend when doing Silverlight layouts. Blend is pretty much indispensable for doing key-frame animations, especially for parts and states model transitions – those would be much more of a pain to code by hand in the XAML I wonder how things will change when Visual Studio 2010 is released, as that will have GUI designer support for XAML – time will tell. Oh, I should mention, Expression Blend can open Visual Studio .sln files which is really handy – both apps will auto load changes made in the other app too which works well normally, although occasionally I find that I need to restart Blend as it seems to get confused by changes that have occurred in Visual Studio.

As for the other tools in Expression studio, well I’m sure I’ll find a use for them eventually :)