Georgia Gamerz

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Microsoft has selected the Savannah College of Art and Design as the first art and design college in the nation to receive Expression Studio software, a donation valued at $2.4 million that will put Microsoft’s latest cutting-edge designer and developer tools into the hands of the college’s nearly 9,000 students.

The donation is part of the Designer Academic Alliance Program, an initiative that partners Microsoft with the nation’s leading educational institutions to permit them to use the software maker’s latest technology.

According to Microsoft, this is the largest deployment of their toolset in an educational environment to date. The new software will be available in the college’s computer labs, classrooms and even on the students’ personal computers if they are enrolled in a design-based program at SCAD.

Expression Studio comprises Expression Web for creating standards-based Web sites; Expression Blend (formally Interactive Designer) for designing rich interactive experiences for Windows®; Expression Design (formally Graphic Designer) for the design of visual elements for Web and Windows experiences; and a new tool, Expression Media, which provides digital asset management and unifies team workflow across the suite.

“The Expression family, together with our Visual Studio® development tools and platform technologies, uniquely elevates the craft of design and user experience to the forefront of the software development process,” said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp. “Our goal is to enable designers to collaborate like never before with development teams so that together they can raise the bar for user experiences and deliver compelling, rich, immersive, highly usable applications and content across the Web, the Windows desktop, mobile devices and the SCAD first art and design college in nation to receive cutting-edge Microsoft software digital home.”

“SCAD is an educational leader in its relationship to industry,” said Peter Weishar, dean of the SCAD School of Film and Digital Media. “We have close partnerships with many of the most sophisticated software providers to utilize several of their flagship products such as Side Effects’ Houdini, mental images mental ray®, Pixar’s RenderMan®, Massive Software, Adobe production suite and Autodesk® Maya®.”

Named one of Kaplan’s “25 cutting-edge schools with an eye toward the future,” the Savannah College of Art and Design is a private, nonprofit, accredited institution with locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Ga., and in Lacoste, France. Undergraduate and graduate degree programs also are offered online through SCAD-eLearning. The college offers Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Architecture, Master of Arts, Master of Arts in Teaching, Master of Fine Arts, and Master of Urban Design degrees.