Acrylic Targets Graphics Professionals

A beta of an upcoming graphics program, code-named Acrylic, shows that Microsoft plans to compete with Adobe in the professional graphics market. Although Acrylic has an interesting combination of features, it falls short of either Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Possible reasons for Microsoft’s entry into the market include a desire to win over one of the last remaining Mac strongholds, the need to fend off a platform threat posed by Adobe’s pending acquisition of Macromedia and its Flash technology, or a desire to lay a foundation for future design tools for Longhorn and Avalon.

Acrylic was originally developed by Hong Kong—based Creature House and sold under the name Expression. Microsoft acquired Creature House in Nov. 2003.

Interesting but Incomplete Features

Acrylic allows graphic designers to create both vector and pixel graphics within the same document.

Pixel graphics are composed of a two-dimensional grid of pixels, each of which is assigned a color. Pixel programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, give artists the electronic equivalents of painting tools such as airbrushes and paint sprayers and allow artists to apply a wide variety of effects. Pixel programs are particularly useful for retouching photographs. Pixel images, however, cannot be easily resized and made larger without a loss in image quality.