Patrick Hansen.com

Microsoft announced the release of Expression Blend 3 Preview recently at MIX. I’ve been working with it on a recent project and I must say, the improvements are pretty great so far.

I actually haven’t had the need to use all of them yet, but some of the major improvements are intellisense (code hinting) for XAML and the ability to access the .cs (C#) files directly within the app.

Design
As for the Design aspect, there is support for importing Photoshop and Illustrator files. Of course there are some limitations with blend modes and effects, but still a big win for the design aspect.

Better drawing support on the canvas, selecting and working with nested objects.

Improved gradient tool support.

Effects
There are some effects such as shader and blur.

Data
They have made it fairly simple for a designer to tie in mock data to dynamic components such as list and datagrids, etc. You practically do not even need to touch code to pull in the data.

For more info check this video that Adam Kinney and Unni Ravindranathan put together on Channel9.msdn.com :

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/First-Look-at-Expression-Blend-3/

or visit the site:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/features/Default.aspx?key=blend3preview

I started messing around in Microsoft Expression Design 2.

After dabbling around in it, I wanted to see if I could do some illustrating in it. I decided to work on a Mighty Mouse image. It is pretty simple and not the most complex subject for a digital illustration, but it is a good first experimental piece.

I will tackle some more complex subjects and designs in the near future, especially with a project I am currently working on for Microsoft.

The tools are fairly easy to get used to based on working in Adobe’s tools. Some of the effects and filters like Gaussian blur and glows behave a little unexpectedly, yet they offer most of the properties that other tools provide. I barely used any in this illustration, since I couldn’t obtain the effect I wanted. I ended up just using shapes, gradients with alphas on the stops and some layering.