How to Set Preferences and Options in Expression Design 2

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For this first chapter I have opened Abstract Listener, Blue Pattern, Design Monster, Orange Abstract and sm_web. These files can be found in your Chapter 01, Project Files folder. Before I begin working here in Microsoft Expression Design 2, I'm going to go ahead and open up the Preferences pane, so I can set a few key preferences, so that I have the best working experience possible here inside the tool.

I am going to come up to the Edit menu, choose Options, and select General, or I could simply hit Ctrl+K on my keyboard. Inside the General Preferences pane there are a couple of different things that I want to pay attention to. First of which is this Rectangle Antialiasing. Now by default this is set to Crisp. But if I want to, I can change that to Smooth, and essentially what this option is telling you is, this is the specific antialiasing method that Expression Design is going to use when you are exporting to a bitmap, and you can see that if you hover over this it will tell you, the entire antialias rectangle edges when exporting to a bit map. So for instance, if you pick Smooth, and then go ahead and click OK, and then you go into what's called a Pixel Preview, which you can access by coming to the View menu, and choosing Pixel Preview, or simply using Ctrl+Y on you keyboard.

When you click that you are going to notice somewhat of a shift on your image, and when I zoom in, by grabbing the zoom tool or hitting the letter Z on my keyboard. You can zoom in into this corner, and you are going to notice here that it's got a very antialias edge, and it's going to be just like a bitmapped image would be if you would have exported it out for say a project in Expression Web, or for the Web in general. So if you like this kind of preview, you can keep it that way, or you could simply come back on to the View menu, turn off Pixel Preview, and go about your work. Now I actually suggest coming back in your Preferences by using Ctrl+K on the keyboard, and changing the Rectangle Antialiasing from Smooth back the Crisp just to maintain the default.

Now a couple of other things that I want to take a look at here inside of the Preferences pane, I want to talk about this option right here, where it says, Create new layer above current layer. Now this is just by default, every time you create a new layer, it's going to create one directly above the current layer that you are working on. So for instance, if you look at the file I have opened here, there is only one layer. If I created a new layer, it would go directly above that layer by having this option checked on. Now if I turn that off, each and every time I create a new layer, it will be directly beneath the layer that I am working on. Now for some people this is a great way to work. For me personally this is not how I choose to work, so I always make sure that I have that turned on. Now the other thing that I want to point out inside of the Options here is the Mouse Wheel options here down here at the bottom.

Now by default the Mouse wheel usage is set to Zoom, and what that means is, every time I scroll up or down with my scroll wheel mouse, you will need the scroll wheel mouse to do this. That means that I am going to zoom in and out of my document. So I will go ahead and show that right now. I am going to go ahead and click OK right now, and if I scroll back and forth with my mouse here, you will notice that I zoom out like that, and zoom in like so, that's just by moving the scroll wheel on my mouse. Now if I go back into Preferences again, and change this, you will notice here I can change to Vertical scrolling, click OK, and here we go, we just scroll up and down inside of the document, and then if I go back into the Preferences again, you will notice that I can change it to Horizontal scrolling as well. Click OK, and we will move back and forth from side to side. Now the last thing we are going to talk about here, is the mouse wheel zoom about mouse position. This is just saying where the orientation of the zoom is going to generate from. So for instance, if I have Zoom selected, I want to make sure I have this checked, so that when I click OK, and come back in here, that the zoom is oriented around where my mouse cursor is. So the center point of where I am zooming is always right there on top of my cursor. It's just a better way to work in my opinion, because it gives you a little bit better control over exactly where you are zooming in on your images.

Let's go back here into the Preferences dialog box and continue to look here. Now here at the bottom you will notice we have options for the Color Dropper, and there's two options inside of here, you can either select to have your Picked Color with the Color Dropper, reflect Object Color, or Screen Color. I am going to go ahead and make sure that I have that set to Object Color, that way when I am using the Color Dropper I can pick up attributes from other objects while I am working inside of Expression Design. Now let's go ahead and let's move forward here to the Workspace panel, and inside of this there are couple of options that you need to be aware of.

Inside of here you have the ability to change the Theme of your Workspace, and also what's called the Workspace Zoom. Now I have chosen to work with the Expression dark interface, but you could also choose to work with Expression light, and what that's going to do is just lighten everything up. As you can see it went from a dark neutral gray to a light neutral gray. That's one of the things that I really enjoy about Expression, is it has always got a neutral gray interface to work from, which helps you accurately perceive color, and that's going to make you work you more professionally.

The second thing we will take a look at here is the Workspace Zoom, and what this feature allows you to do, is increase the size of the overall interface here inside of Expression Design. If I drag this slider to the right, you will notice that the interface gets bigger. What this is going to do is, become very effective if you're giving a presentation, or if you're working on a high resolution monitoring and you might have a little trouble seeing certain aspects of the interface, you can just jump right into this Preference and zoom it up really quick, and you will instantly get a bigger preview of everything that's going on inside of your Workspace.

Now I am going to go ahead, and I am going to reset that back to 100, 100 is the default, and if you find that this is actually too big for you, you can even drag to the left and shrink it up a little bit more if you wanted to. I am not going to do that here, I will leave it to 100, and we will move on. But before I do, I am going to go ahead and switch my Theme back to Expression dark, that's just a personal preference of mine, and now we are going to move on to the Stroke section.

Now inside of the Stroke panel here, the one thing I want to pay particular attention to, is this option right here, Scale stroke width. Now what this is going to do, is affect how a stroke scales with your object when you are scaling it up and down. So for instance, if you have a stroke on an object, and you scale it down, and you don't have this option turned on, the Stroke will not scale with the object, it will remain the same size. So you can wind up with a really small object with a really huge stroke on the outside of it, and that's not what you want to do. You want everything to scale proportionately, so that when you are working, things move along with each other smoothly. Now there are few other options that I want to pay attention to, especially if I am using a Walcom Tablet. Down here in the Freehand tool options you will notice that you have the ability to both, Show a pressure trail, and also Enable pressure sensitivity, and adjust the pressure scale. Now if you are using drawing tablet for any of your projects, these options can be especially helpful. The first thing we are going to take a look at here is the Enabled pressure sensitivity. When using a drawing tablet, this is going to enable you to use the sensitivity features of that tablet, so that when you are drawing,