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Amongst the tools announced are the Acrylic Graphic Designer, a painting, illustration and effects tool for creating graphic designs, the Sparkle Interactive Designer, a user-interface design tool for application development using the Windows Presentation Foundation; and Quartz Web Designer, a layout and design tool for creating Web sites.

Expressions itself is by no means new. The Acrylic graphics tool is based on illustration software known as Expressions that has been available from Microsoft for the PC and Mac for some time. Microsoft

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acquired this illustrations software when it bought out its owners Creature House in 2003.

The new Acrylic Graphic Designer offers visual effects such as blurs, drop shadows, colour correction and filters as well as alternate between vector-based and pixel-based elements. The Sparkle Interactive Designer combines vectors, pixel images, 3-D content, video, high-quality text, and animation. Microsoft says that content can be contextualised by applying custom styles and layout to aid end user usability.

Finally, the Quartz Web Designer is a graphical HTML and CSS development tool. The company says it will allow the direct manipulation of positioning, sizing and padding with CSS page layouts. The program provides easy access to task panes, toolbars and features.

While many of these features are not particularly innovative, Microsoft sees its ace in the hole being integration with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio, XAML and ASP.NET, which allows design teams to work more closely with technical development.

It will, according to a Microsoft speokesperson, be available 'sometime in 2006'.