"It just drives designers up a wall," said Cuenco, who works for interactive design firm, Avenue A-Razorfish, in Portland, Ore.

But those kinds of results reflect the typically clumsy workflow today between designers and developers, according to Cuenco, blaming in part software tools used by the respective camps that don't talk well with one another.

That's the problem that Microsoft Corp., with its upcoming suite of Expression design software, hopes to solve.

"There is not a clean hand-off, and we can fix that with our software," said Tim O'Brien, group manager for Microsoft's platform strategy group.

At its Mix 06 conference in Las Vegas next week, Microsoft hopes to convince the several thousand attendees expected to show up -- most of them loyal to Adobe Systems Inc. tools such as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver -- to add Expression to their toolboxes.