Three Minutes Max: Illustrator

This crowd favorite is back! Don’t miss this fun-filled, action-packed, highly educational, and mind-blowing session: Three Minutes Max!

Each of our instructors will have no more than three minutes to share their favorite Illustrator tip—then you get to vote for your favorite!

In past years, some of the best tips have been held for this session… so you don’t want to miss it!

Virtual Photography: Creating Photos Instead of Shooting Them

Expose yourself to revolutionary photographic workflows that offer more creative freedom while saving valuable time. Learn to create reusable assets for an unlimited number of new projects — including photographs, animations, emails, social posts, web ads, and more.

Join Lisa Carney and Chris Converse in this inspiring session where they’ll reveal new workflows they created for big-name brands. Reclaim your time — and rediscover the joy of renewed creative freedom.

Topics include:

  • Thinking expansively
  • 3D software options
  • Workflow best practices
  • Bringing it all together in Photoshop

Microsoft 365 for Designers

You use both Microsoft and Adobe tools and services, right? But while you weren’t looking they became a dynamic duo, with well-integrated technologies to make your workflow more successful and productive. If your organization uses Microsoft 365, this session will help improve your collaboration and efficiency, both within and outside of your creative team.

We’ll explore:

  •  An introduction to Microsoft Teams
  •  Understanding how file storage works in Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive
  • Using Adobe Add-ins to share assets efficiently within the Microsoft environment
  • Leveraging Teams to simplify your workflow

Making Illustrator Artwork Look Organic

We all know and recognize the clean, crisp lines created with Illustrator. But what if you want something that looks more… organic? Learn how to create trendy, handmade illustrations, replicas of traditional printing techniques, dirty grunge styles, or your own unique artistic style—all while maintaining the edibility and scalability we love in vector graphics.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Apply your personal drawing style
  • Replace boring, uniform lines
  • Embrace and exploit randomness
  • Combine pixels and paths with grungy textures
  • Maximize and maintain editability
  • Create and apply organic graphic styles

Power Up Your Production with Styles

Every InDesign user knows that styles are essential for efficiently formatting text because they allow us to quickly format content and easily make changes later on. Using styles is also a requirement if you want to take advantage of InDesign’s powerful automation features. But why do some of us continue to resist?

In this session, you’ll learn how to use styles the right way and why they’re so worth it!

Topics include:

  • The fastest way to create and redefine styles
  • Thinking creatively with styles
  • Leveraging Nested Styles to apply text formatting automatically
  • Style mapping from Word

Get Productive with InDesign Forms and e-Signatures

This session will teach you everything you need to know about designing beautiful PDF forms and web forms with InDesign. And while aesthetics are important, we’ll mainly focus on what you can do with InDesign’s form fields and how to take your forms to the next level, using unique text-tags from Acrobat Sign (included in Creative Cloud).

Topics include:

  • Designing InDesign forms by creating text fields, radio buttons, pull-down menus, and many other field types
  • Adding calculations to existing fields, setting conditions, or masking field information
  • Sending and monitoring forms using Acrobat Sign for information gathering, approvals, and e-signatures
  • The differences between Acrobat Sign forms and PDF forms, and how they relate to web forms
  • Next steps

Illustrator Under the Bonnet

If your Illustrator graphics still look like stick figure drawings, it’s time to take things up a notch! Unlocking the secrets of “unseen Illustrator” could transform your art from basic to breathtaking! See how to deconstruct Illustrator art to understand how it was created. Learn the steps to replicate the techniques of master illustrators in your own projects. Join Tony for this fast-paced, in-depth session to see powerful techniques broken down step-by-step.

Topics include:

  • Through the Illustrator looking glass
  • Using X-ray vision in Illustrator
  • How Illustrator works behind the scenes
  • The key panels you need to keep an eye on

Make Photoshop Your Robot

Some of the coolest things you can do in Photoshop require repeating the same mundane steps… over and over and over again. Stop the madness! You bought a computer so that you could tell it what to do, right? So it’s time to speed up your work and make Photoshop your… um… robot.

Learn how to automate tasks using:

  • Actions
  • Scripts
  • Batch processing
  • Transform Again
  • Data-driven graphics
  • And more!

10 Essential InDesign Efficiency Tips

Join us for a fast-paced, fun-filled, tip-a-palooza to boost your productivity! We’ll zip through a ton of handy tips and tricks that every InDesign user needs to know. Plus, you’ll get primed to soak up all the InDesign goodness the rest of the conference will bring.

Topics include:

  • If you’re not customizing InDesign, you’re missing out
  • Essential shortcuts
  • Hidden (or obscure) helpful features

PowerPoint and Accessibility

PowerPoint presentations are just a fact of life. However, making them accessible can be a struggle. It’s time to supercharge your skills for creating accessible PowerPoint presentations that reach more of your audience regardless of their abilities. We’ll cover the fundamentals of accessible presentation design including:

  • Presentation layouts and color
  • Program barriers to watch out for
  • Accessible video and audio
  • Converting presentations to PDF
  • Tips for giving a more accessible presentation