Okay so it’s NOT open source, and you’ve got to download it from the Microsoft website, however you’ll love me forever for this little nugget of a software. I found out about it via DIGIT magazine. Of course something like Computer Arts should also be saying something, however they’re corporate whores that obviously get paid by companies to pimp their software and their rubbish culture (yeah sorry I’m on a bit of an attack on CA right now).

So back to Expression. As far as I can tell, it would seem Microsoft bought this software, didn’t know what to do with it, so they released it as a preview for everyone to do whatever they want. I can’t live without this program at work, as we don’t have enough Illustrator licenses, this freeware software is ideal.

What makes Expression unique is the fact that it blends raster manipulation tools with vector graphics. It was originally intended from the direction it took as an illustrator’s tool really, trying hard to bring the traditional artist to the digital realm.

Importing and Exporting You can import bitmaps, so the list includes, tiff, bmp, jpgs, gifs and even psd (photoshop files).

You can export directly as illustrator files, Flash files, pdfs and EPS files.

Main Features The main feature about expression are the fact that it actually brings in brushes into the vector realm. If you want vector graphics that look like they’re water colours you’ll find it hard to do that in Illustrator (although I’m not sure about plugins etc).

Another great feature is just how ‘lightweight’ it is. Loading this program up is soo simple with any power of computer. One of the reasons I don’t use Illustrator is because it’s soo heavy and doesn’t react to my commands as fast as I’d like, however the expression engine really does hammer through what I need without any grief.

No problems with fonts, CMYK and RGB colour schemes. This is in direct contrast to Adobe’s Photoshop Elements. It’s very verstaile to be used as a Desk Top Publishing (DTP) program, for SINGLE PAGES. So if you want to quickly deal with a pdf for someone that’s printable and you want to get the colours right you could do a lot worse than this awesome program.

Downfalls. The shortcuts aren’t customisable, so I’ve got to use the s-key to get the arrow rather than the common v-key in most programs.

This is not an open source program, and there doesn’t seem to be much development being happening into it, which is a terrible shame, as it really is worth it. I wish microsoft would just release the code as open source so that people could do something meaningful with it. I think if that were the case this could become a serious contender for Freehand etc. I mean they’re not doing anything with it, or at least not as far as I know of. If anyone’s got any other news then that would be pretty cool to hear about.

Rating: 4/5 only because it’s not open source code. However it’s such a joy to use I’ll let it slide.

Conclusion. Expression is a great light weight program, that although not open source is freeware right now. It’s greatly versatile and combines raster and vector techniques, that bring about a more ‘painters’ tool than anything else. One of my favourite finds of 2004, it was a godsend in many respects.