Certiport Sponsored Lunch Session: Prepare for Adobe Certification

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Take advantage of free Adobe certification testing at CreativePro Week, offered by Certiport. Learn what to expect and how to prepare so you can test with confidence.

Join Chana Messer for a clear, practical breakdown of how the Adobe Certified Professional exams work for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You will learn what skills are being tested and where to focus your time so you can walk in confident and ready. See why certification matters—how it validates your skills, builds confidence, and helps you stand out.

Show up prepared. Take the test. Leave with a credential that proves what you can do.

Key takeaways:

  • Understand how the Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign certification exams are structured
  • Identify the core skills and domains each exam measures
  • Prepare with focused study strategies, exam guides, and practice resources
  • Know what to expect on test day, including format and timing
  • Learn how certification can strengthen your career and support student learning

Scripting Success: Finding and Creating Your Own Automated Solutions

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You’re in the driver’s seat for this fun and collaborative session. Bring your frustrations and nagging problems. Bring your feature requests and wish lists. We’ll brainstorm solutions and create a custom collection of scripts that you can take home.

If your workflow always stops working at certain point, you don’t have to wait around hoping that Adobe or someone else will fix things. You can do it right now—with the help of scripts (even if you don’t know the first thing about coding).

Key takeaways:

  • Where to find great scripts
  • How to build and organize your script collection
  • Understand what is and isn’t scriptable
  • How to make your own scripts with the help of AI

Three Minutes Max: AI

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This crowd favorite is back and better than ever! Don’t miss this fun-filled, action-packed, highly educational, and mind-blowing session where each of our instructors will have just three minutes to share their favorite AI tip for design—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!

From Paper to Possibility

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Step away from your screens in this hands-on workshop where you’ll learn to turn sheets of paper, napkins, newspapers, playing cards, and more into clever puzzles, addictive toys, and delightful magic tricks that spark conversation and connection.

This is a lively, approachable session ideal for professional development, creative warm-ups, and team collaboration—no special skills required. You’ll discover simple creations to break the ice with colleagues, entertain kids, and even score free drinks at the bar.

You’ll learn:

  • Turn a cocktail napkin into a rose
  • Create a newspaper tree that reaches the ceiling
  • Turn a playing card inside out
  • Add color to a black-and-white drawing with a single snap
  • And more “impossibilities”

Mind-Blowing Presentations with PowerPoint—Really!

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PowerPoint can do far more than most people ever see. In this session, Richard Goring shows how bold visuals, smart motion, and creative thinking can completely transform how presentations look, feel, and perform. Expect big ideas, astonishing techniques, and moments that challenge what you think PowerPoint can do.

This session focuses on possibility. See how engaging slides come together quickly, how interaction and movement sharpen a message, and how small creative shifts create massive impact. Leave energized, inspired, and ready to push PowerPoint far beyond the expected.

You will learn how to:

  • See PowerPoint in a completely new way
  • Build bold, visual slides that demand attention
  • Use motion to enhance meaning, not distract
  • Turn simple ideas into high-impact moments

PowerPoint: Your Swiss Army Design Tool

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PowerPoint might be the most underestimated design tool on your computer. In this session, Amanda Dalton shows how to turn a familiar app into a surprisingly powerful instrument for real-world design. Learn how to create polished layouts, simple graphics, and fast visual mockups. Amanda focuses on practical techniques that work with PowerPoint’s strengths.

With humor, clarity, and high energy, Amanda makes designing in PowerPoint feel approachable and genuinely fun. You’ll leave with a fresh perspective on what’s possible, and new confidence when using PowerPoint for design work that goes far beyond the slide deck.

Key takeaways:

  • Rethink PowerPoint as a practical design tool for real-world deliverables
  • Design polished layouts and graphics using PowerPoint’s built-in strengths
  • Create quick mockups and visuals without over-engineering the process
  • Share designs with your colleagues when PowerPoint is the only tool they have

AI in Design: Helpful, Overrated, or Both?

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AI shows up everywhere in creative workflows today—and sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s distracting, and very often it’s misunderstood. For designers juggling many tools, projects, and expectations, the real question isn’t whether to use AI, but how to use it without losing your human judgment, authorship, and creative intent.

In this session, Michael Flarup shares a grounded, designer-first perspective on working with AI as part of a broader creative practice. Drawing from real projects, he explores where AI can support ideation, exploration, and momentum—and where human taste, decision-making, and craft still matter most. This is not a pitch for automation or replacement. It’s a practical look at using AI selectively and critically, alongside familiar design tools, to enhance creative thinking rather than shortcut it.

Key takeaways:

  • Develop a realistic, designer-centered view of AI’s role in creative work
  • Identify where AI helps ideation and exploration—and where it falls short
  • Learn how to integrate AI output into polished, intentional design workflows
  • Understand how to protect authorship, ethics, and personal style
  • Gain language and perspective to have better conversations about AI at work

Accessibility Quickstart Podcast

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Join us for this fun, live recording of the CreativePro Podcast, in a special crossover episode with the Chaxchat, the #1 accessibility podcast. If you’re new to accessibility and don’t know where to start, you just found the perfect session!

Serious Animation for Seriously Fun Presentations

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In this session, Jole Simmons shows how animation can be bold, polished, and genuinely fun when it’s used with intention. You’ll see how motion in PowerPoint can guide attention, control pacing, and add clarity and personality to your slides—without feeling gimmicky or overdone.

Expect a fast-moving, design-first session filled with playful experimentation and “wait… that’s PowerPoint?” moments. Jole treats animation as a creative tool for storytelling, not decoration, showing how small, thoughtful moves can make a big impact.

You’ll leave inspired to push PowerPoint further, experiment with confidence, and create slides that feel polished, engaging, and seriously fun.

Key takeaways:

  • Turn ordinary slides into memorable moments with smart motion choices
  • Add polish and playfulness without crossing into “too much”
  • Have more fun building slides—and make it obvious to your audience

Hack Your Workflow: Unexpected Uses for InDesign’s Features

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InDesign is more than a layout tool—it’s a powerful problem-solving engine hiding in plain sight. This session explores unexpected ways to use InDesign’s native features, turning familiar tools into clever workflow solutions. From repurposing the Table of Contents for nontraditional lists to using Data Merge to build dynamic storyboards, you’ll see how to push InDesign well beyond standard page layout.

Through practical examples, this session encourages designers, marketers, and content creators to rethink everyday challenges and replace manual work with smarter, automated solutions.

Key takeaways:

  • Discover unconventional ways to use InDesign features beyond their original intent
  • See real examples of native tools repurposed to solve nontraditional layout and workflow challenges
  • Replace manual, repetitive work with smarter, automated solutions
  • Approach everyday design challenges with a more experimental, problem-solving mindset