Microsoft Expression Design

» see microsoft.com/expression as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Creature House was a small studio in Hong Kong run by Alex S. C. Hsu and Irene H. H. Lee, and what it invented was called the skeletal stroke. The paper went to SIGGRAPH in 1994. The idea was that a brush stroke did not have to be a line with a width, it could be an entire drawing stretched and bent along a path, deforming as the path curved. Nothing else in the vector world worked that way, and twenty years later nothing much does.

The software built on it went through the usual chain of publishers before anyone had heard of it. It sold as Fractal Design Expression through Ray Dream and then through the companies Ray Dream turned into, positioned as the vector companion to Painter. Creature House took its marketing rights back at the end of 2000 and published version 2 under its own name. Version 3.3, in November 2003, was the last release Creature House ever made.

Microsoft bought the product and the trademarks that September and hired Hsu as an architect. The rewrite ran under the codename Acrylic, was shown at the 2005 developer conference as Acrylic Graphic Designer, was announced as Expression Graphic Designer, and finally became Expression Design in December 2006. It came out on 30 April 2007 at MIX 07, rebuilt in WPF, as the illustration application in a four-part suite aimed squarely at the designers Adobe had just finished locking up by buying Macromedia.

It never came near me and it never came near anyone I knew. Around 2005 the graphics program on a home machine in Turkey was Photoshop, and where the copy came from was not a question anybody asked out loud. Forum signatures on donanimhaber and frmtr were raster work, made in whatever you had. A vector editor whose reason to exist was exporting XAML for a Microsoft UI framework had nothing to say to that room, and Microsoft eventually gave the whole suite away to students through DreamSpark without changing the answer.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what microsoft bought ~

The acquisition got the technology and the man who invented it, which is more than most acquisitions get. What shipped was less than what was bought. Microsoft's version dropped a good part of the raster editing the original Creature House program had, so the thing that arrived in 2007 was narrower than the thing that existed in 2003 under a different name.

The clearer loss was LivingCels. Creature House had a second product built on the same skeletal stroke work, an animation tool, and it got as far as a public preview. After the sale it never reached a final release and was never heard from again. Microsoft bought a research idea and shipped a subset of one application built on it. The other one did not survive the trip.

~ what it became ~

Version 2 came with Expression Studio 2 in May 2008 and version 4 with Studio 4 in June 2010, where the headline new feature was importing Windows Metafiles. That is the feature list of a product nobody is working on. Meanwhile Illustrator kept being Illustrator, and the one genuinely original thing Expression could do was buried three menus deep in a program most designers had never installed.

On 20 December 2012 Microsoft ended the suite. Blend was absorbed into Visual Studio where it was actually useful, and Expression Web and Expression Design were both cut loose as free downloads with no support and no future versions. The final Design build carries a version number and a date, and nothing came after it. A fan site called expressiondesign4 has spent the years since keeping the installer reachable, which is a strange afterlife for a piece of Hong Kong graphics research and better than most dead software gets.

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