First steps

These tutorials are designed to help you learn your way around the interface quickly and easily. We'll begin by creating a new document, adding a simple shape, and then applying attributes to the shape.

To launch Expression Design, click Start, point to All Programs, click Microsoft Expression, and then click Microsoft Expression Design.

This program doesn’t automatically open a new document when you start it. To open a new document, click New on the File menu, or press CTRL+N. Expression Design displays the New Document dialog box, in which you can specify an artboard size and document resolution.

For this tutorial, choose 800 x 600 from the Presets drop-down list. Then click on the Resolution field and type 200. Then click OK.

The main document window is where you create your art work. You can draw on the document page or in the pasteboard area, but note that live effects appear only inside the document page (also called the artboard).

If you later want to scale your whole document or change its resolution, click Document Size on the File menu. To change the size of the document frame without scaling your objects, click Artboard Size on the File menu.

Zooming and scrolling

To scroll horizontally or vertically, use the scroll bars along the right and bottom sides of the document window. You can also hold down the Spacebar while you drag inside the document window. This lets you scroll in any direction with the Pan tool. (You can also select the Pan tool  from the Toolbox.)

To zoom in or out on an area of your document, click the Zoom tool  in the Toolbox and click or draw over an area you'd like to zoom in on. Hold down the ALT key while clicking to zoom out. The Zoom Magnification slider, in the lower-left corner of the document window, displays the current zoom level and lets you quickly zoom in or out. To do this, drag the current magnification level up or to the right to increase, or down or to the left to decrease. Alternately, you can click the current magnification value to type in your own custom value, or click the down arrow to the right of the value to display the list of magnification levels.

Press CTRL+1 to set your document view to Actual Size, and click Center View on the View menu to center the document page in the window. You can also zoom in and out by pressing CTRL+hyphen (-) or CTRL+equal (= ).

For more information about zooming and scrolling, see Navigating your document.

Panels

You'll use two basic panels when creating graphics in Expression Design: the Properties panel and the Layers panel. You can always open or close a panel by clicking it on the Window menu. Normally, these two panel live in a field on the right side of the application window. However, you can "unpin" them from this field by clicking the Float/Dock button to the right of the panel's title. When a panel is floating, you can drag it anywhere on your computer screen (or even to a second screen, if you have one). For more information on panels, see Arranging your workspace and Panel widgets .

Now that you have an overview of the Expression Design workspace and panels, click here for a tutorial on drawing vector objects.