Mag+ Designd: Mobile Apps Made Easy for Creatives

Sponsored Breakfast Session

Mag+ Designd:
Mobile Apps Made Easy for Creatives

Wednesday, 8:15 am – 8:45 a.m.

Do you have InDesign or print files? Want to take them digital and mobile? mag+ Designd is the industry-leading digital publishing software for design professionals. With InDesign-based creative tools and a simple, but powerful distribution workflow, Designd is intuitive, efficient, and easy to use… and a great alternative to Adobe DPS and AEM! With mag+, you can download our tools, build your app, and publish your content — all in one autonomous workflow. And through our rich Knowledge Base, Community Forums, and dedicated Support and Services, we’ll help you answer any questions along the way.

Attend this session to learn how to build your brand and publish your own content with mag+. Case studies will showcase exactly how our clients are using mag+ to share content with their users.


The Power of a Great Template

The Power of a Great Template

Friday, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm

What is an effective PowerPoint template? In this session we will be covering topics that run the gamut of the design process, from understanding your users wants, to best executing aesthetic choices effectively in PowerPoint. From color themes to complete template systems, we will walk through several high-level topics to ensure that your templates are fully utilized and adopted successfully.

  • Theme, template, and guidelines, oh my!
  • Understanding your users
  • Migrating the legacy

Simple PowerPoint Tricks for Effective Presentations

Simple PowerPoint Tricks for Effective Presentations

Friday, 2:30 pm – 3:15 pm

PowerPoint is the basis for much of the material you use, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. This session will help you revolutionize the way you use it to make your presentations more effective using visuals, diagrams, and animations. We’ll cover productivity tips on creating content, quick formatting, and animating graphs in two clicks. And we will help enhance your content with better design techniques, image manipulation, animation combos, and precise motion paths. And this session will inspire you to create sophisticated interactive content with triggers, hyperlinks, and custom content. Steps to take: 1. Attend this session. 2. Become a PowerPoint Legend.


Graphiti: Data, Design, Deliver

Graphiti: Data, Design, Deliver

Friday, 1:30 pm – 2:15 pm

As the world is increasingly obsessed with data, we will look at some of the creative possibilities of charting within the presentation space with a touch of Storytelling. We will also dig into the elements that delineate a chart from a graphic and their effectiveness given the right context.

Stylize graphs to maximize their impact using design fundamentals and imply visual meaning while maintaining maximum editability.

  • Deeper stylization capabilities using charts in PPT
  • Graph visual styles effective at communicating information

Lunch Panel: Presentation Design, E-Learning, and the Future of Communication

Lunch Panel:
Presentation Design, E-Learning, and the Future of Communication

Friday, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Hear from four industry experts on where presentation design is headed, and learn what you need to know today to be prepared.

  • Critical skills for designers
  • What software will we use in 2020?
  • How are we affected by the incredible rise in eLearning and online presentations?

Beautiful Typography for Presentations

Beautiful Typography for Presentations

Friday, 11:15 am – 12:00 pm

Business people who are taught PowerPoint/Keynote skills rarely look at the beautiful world of typography, with all of it’s history and influence. As graphic designers we adore type and recognize that it can make or break the effectiveness of a communication piece.

Standard typographic features such as leading and kerning are staples to InDesign, but how do we use them in programs like PowerPoint? And what new typographic opportunities (and challenges) might we have to think about when the typography moves? How can we create builds that integrate with type to engage audiences and peak their interests?

During this session we’ll look at all the controls, and share some ideas to boost your signal when presenting content with type, including:

  • Learn how to adjust type for improved legibility
  • Create emphasis and order without defaulting to bullets
  • Integrating with themes in your presentation
  • Use slide master’s parent type format to improve design for common users
  • Awesome use-cases to introduce typography in presentation design
  • Making type move for visual impact

Just Say No: Ten Alternatives to Bullets

Just Say No: Ten Alternatives to Bullets

Friday, 9:45 am – 10:15 am

One of the most damaging elements to the culture of presentation design is the dreaded Bullet feature used within PowerPoint. What started out as a highly functional, and useful, feature turned into a lazy solution for business professionals, professors, students, and more.

Nearly a decade ago Seth Godin, famous for his authoring on effective presentations, wrote in a free eBook and blog post about how bullets make for a terrible presentation practice. He wasn’t entirely against them but offered guidance as to the best way to use them avoiding redundancy in formatting and how to keep their usefulness intact.

A decade — and thousands of slides — later, Kristina Heaps has been deep in the corporate-wild with the dreaded bullet slide format and has found ways to delight her clients with alternatives to the lazy format. Creating a more visual experience that is also more functional and contextually relevant to the content of her client needs. Over this past decade she has built a library of slide solutions that are alternates to bullet slides. She will explain her top ten alternatives that clients appreciate the most.

In this session:

  • Contextual alternatives to bullet slides
  • Efficiency tips for formatting
  • Introducing animation as a solution
  • Approaching bullets like visual infographics

My Life in Presentations: From Ginormous to Intimate

My Life in Presentations: From Ginormous to Intimate

Friday, 9:00 am – 9:45 am

Have you ever attended a massive keynote at an Adobe event and wonder what went into designing the graphics for that 200 foot wide screen? Curious about what makes presentations so different from other areas of design? This session will cover that and much more.

We will take a walk through all that is presentation design, and assess the stigma that surrounds this field. We will cover fundamentals and building blocks of successful working relationships with content writers, and how to overcome hurdles in the design process whether it be for a large keynote or a small intimate audience.

This session will focus on finding the Zen of Presentations and leave you with a new perspective on this area of design.

  • Effective storytelling… even when the story isn’t sexy
  • Working with event branding and carrying a consistent visual style
  • Understanding multi-screen situations and how they relate to smaller single screen scenarios.
  • Quick tips on image selection, type scale, color, and patterns

PDF Beyond Printing & Viewing – PDF for Archiving

PDF Beyond Printing & Viewing – PDF for Archiving

Thursday, 10:15 am – 11:00 am

Everyone knows that PDF excels as a format for presentation — both printing and viewing — of final form textual and graphical content. And most seasoned InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop users are well aware of the ISO PDF/X standards supported by these applications that are used to ensure reliable printing. However, governmental, academic, and research organizations are increasing requiring submission of PDF files conforming to one of the PDF/A standards designed to be “safe” for document archiving. And likewise, there are increasing calls for PDF files to be more accommodating in terms of supporting access to “underlying data” associated with that beautiful PDF final form content.

This session will make the case not only for designers and publishers to concern themselves with not only printability, but also archivability of their PDF. We’ll explore not only methods of creating PDF that supports both PDF/X and PDF/A now, but directions that you might expect going forward towards making this a seamless and easy experience along for support for “PDF Open Data.”


Secrets of Silicon Valley Presentations

Secrets of Silicon Valley Presentations

Friday, 10:30 am – 11:15 am

Discover how to take your PowerPoint and Keynote decks to the next level in this Course. Presentation guru Jole Simmons reveals the slide design techniques used by pro-level presentation designers at cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies.

He’ll cover the essential elements of a strong presentation and teach several different techniques you can use to create eye-catching and compelling slides such as creating scrolling animated phone feed; interstitial graphic design tips; and ways to bring maps and charts to life.