Adobe Illustrator to Expression Design conversion issues
Microsoft Expression is a product suite developed with design community as one of the primary target audience. The individual products within this suite – like Expression Design and Expression Blend - have been designed to inter-operate together in a way that makes the workflow between a Designer and a Developer seamless and productive. As of today, Adobe Illustrator remains the predominant visual design tool. And converting Illustrator files to work with expression suite products has some limitations that need to be understood well to avoid costly rework.
Given the large pool of designers using Adobe Illustrator, a very competent product by every means, most likely a lot of them will continue using Adobe Illustrator as the primary design tool. It is possible to open the Illustrator files using Expression Design and save it as .design file. Using this approach, it is possible to loop in a designer working on Illustrator in development effort using Blend and XAML. But it is very important to understand that there are several conversion issues between the two products (Adobe Illustrator to Expression Design). A full list of these conversion related instructions is available here. It is important that any visual design development team stays away from these types of visual design effects if they plan to export Illustrator based design for XAML based development.
