On Thursday, I attended the Expression launch event in Chicago. Expression is Microsoft's new line of tools for creative designers. I'm not a designer, but I care deeply about good design, so I've always tried to incorporate design professionals into the software development process. That's what makes me so excited about Expression - because it provides tools that bring visual designers into the software development process seamlessly and effectively.

ISVs take note: The bar is about to be raised - now that the platform and tools enable more beautiful software, users are soon going to expect more beautiful software. Start thinking about how you can make your software more visually appealing and engaging, and consider how you are going to incorporate professional designers into your development process. Expression can help.

There are four products in the Expression line (only Expression Web is released at this time):

• Expression Blend is arguably the most exciting product for software vendors who create Windows programs.  Expression Blend allows you to create "next-generation applications that blend the best of the Web and the desktop." Windows Vista gives us the platform to create great client software; Expression Blend and Visual Studio give us the tools to harness the power of the platform.
• Expression Web is a full-featured web authoring tool. On its own, it will compete favorably with the likes of DreamWeaver. However, what excites me about Expression Web is that it was designed from the ground up to integrate into a broader web application development process. It works seamlessly with Visual Studio, so it will play a central role in making dynamic web applications that not only work great but look great, too.
• Expression Design lets visual designers create and manipulate vector assets that can be exported to XAML (where they can be made interactive with Expression Blend). As I said, I'm not a designer, so I won't be a power user of this tool, but I know how to perform basic graphic manipulations. I'm looking forward to giving this product a spin and learning more about creating vector images.
• Expression Media is "a professional asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation." Expression Media also imports assets from countless input formats and encodes to ideal output formats.

What does this mean for software vendors? To me, it means that there is finally an effective way to incorporate visual designers into the development process for both Windows and web applications. Designers are the people who turn the merely functional into the beautiful and usable. Before Expression, visual designers had one set of tools and programmers had another, and there were only ad hoc ways to bring the two worlds together. The result was low-tech and repetitive at best, chaotic at worst … and typically designers were simply excluded from the software development process altogether. Expression allows visual designers to work in tools that feel natural to them and integrate their results with Visual Studio. You get the right people working in the right tools at the right time.

Read more about Expression at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/.

DISCLAIMER: I work at Microsoft, but the opinions expressed here are my own. This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.