Customer Rating: 
Summary: Useful set of tools for the web and design
Comment: I purchased the Expression Studio 2 suite of programs a few months ago and have really enjoyed working with all of them. The current version seems stable and useful. The program modules enhance each other and work well together. It has very good documentation for all the programs in the help files. These are advanced programs that take some time to become proficient with but are worth the effort.
I use the Design program with a wacom graphic tablet The user interface is well designed and the tools have a consistent logic. Import and export capabilities are good.
I have found a lot of use for the Media module. This is a powerful, easy to use, photo organizing program. Another feature is the ability to make html galleries for the web. There are several options for gallery designs and they are easy to modify in a web design program.
Studio includes Expression Web, a standards compliant web authoring program geared to using css as the basic design format. Once you get used to the css style of web design the tools and set up of Expression Web make sense.
Studio also includes Encoder which produces a set of files that can be incorporated into a web site to display movie files for the web. By using tools in Blend you can customize the "skin" that holds the movie file.
Blend also allows you to design Silverlight applications to animate the web user-interface. This gets a bit complicated for someone like myself without a strong coding background, but is doable with some persistence.
Expression has a strong future in designing for the emerging rich media interface of the web. I am glad I purchased it and I find powerful new ways of using the tools as I explore the extensive feature set of the programs.
Customer Rating: Summary: Quite a package
Comment: Version 2 of this suite of programs seems to have smoothed out some rough edges from the first release, as you'd expect.
Blend 2 has helpful verbose tooltips on the various properties you can set in the Properties Panel.
Blend 2 offers Silverlight 1 layout and design, but people who buy Blend 2 or Expression Studio 2 will get Blend 2.5 for free. Blend 2.5 will be able to create Silverlight 2 applications. You can download the Blend 2.5 Preview for free. It can run on the same computer as Blend 2.
Expression Web 2 is a solid HTML/CSS Web design program. If you edit HTML or web pages, it's as good as any program out there.
Expression Design 2 is a capable drawing program similar to Adobe Illustrator but without as many filters and effects and layer blending modes. Its main advantage is its native file format is XAML so anything you create can be exported for WPF or Silverlight. I've had good luck opening Adobe Illustrator files with it, then exporting them as XAML.
Expression Encoder 2 is supposed to be faster than version 1 and produce better results, according to the training videos on the DVD. The presenter really seems to know video production and the free training videos have whetted my appetite for the full training series.
That brings me to the first extra -- there are hours of free training videos from Total Training on the DVD. They'll give you a quick start on each program. It's a lot easier to watch someone demonstrate something in a video than to read step-by-step procedures in a manual.
The Expression Web training gives a quick tour of the program and new features in version 2. The Expression Blend videos cover a lot of info about how Blend creates WPF content. In fact, the trainer said that basically Blend is a XAML editor. If you are a design person, you'll learn much about the terminology and functionality of WPF. If you're a developer, you'll learn to visualize the XAML code you're familiar with.
The second valuable extra is that Expression Studio includes a free version of Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition. If you don't have Visual Studio 2008, that alone is worth about $200.
If you are a developer interested in learning to develop new WPF and Silverlight applications, this is a full-featured toolkit. If you're a designer interested in developing rich Internet content, this is a cohesive set of design tools.
And if you are a developer with an interest in design or a designer who can dip into code, there's a lot of power available to you in Expression Studio 2.
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