Pocket Guide to Design Law in the Age of AI

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In this session, legal expert Kathryn Goldman will delve into the three pivotal legal areas every designer must navigate: contract, copyright, and trademark. As AI continues to revolutionize the design industry, understanding its impact on these legal domains has never been more crucial. Kathryn will break down top-line best practices, offering a clear, concise guide tailored to the needs of today’s designer.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this session will equip you with the knowledge to handle legal challenges in your creative work confidently. Expect to walk away with practical tips that will serve as your go-to reference in the rapidly evolving world of design law. Don’t miss this opportunity to turn complex legal concepts into your competitive advantage in the age of AI.

AI in PowerPoint

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AI is everywhere these days, even in the world of presentation design—both inside PowerPoint and in dozens of standalone apps and services. Discover how to leverage AI to help you create effective presentations in record time. Streamline your process with help from AI to generate everything from a basic outline or storyboard to custom graphics and templates.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Take advantage of PowerPoint’s Copilot feature
  • Work with Designer and PowerPoint
  • Create on-brand content with a variety of tools
  • Generate text-based content
  • Use AI tools for image manipulation and layout generation

Figma—What’s the Hype About?

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You’ve heard everyone talking about Figma, but what exactly is it? Join us in this introductory session where we’ll explore Figma from the perspective of a Creative Cloud user. We’ll start with the interface and design techniques, then expand into the truly unique features of Figma, including components, dynamic layouts, collaboration, and even prototyping. Check out this new trend in design, where designers, writers and developers can all exist peacefully in a creative environment.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Navigate the Figma interface
  • Work with components
  • Design elements with an “awareness” of layout
  • Collaborate
  • Make the most of prototyping and animation capabilities

Evaluating, Choosing, and Managing Fonts

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Did you ever hear the saying “the designer with the most fonts wins”? It’s cute, funny, and relatable. And totally wrong.

You don’t need the most fonts, you need the best fonts for your work.

It’s time to curate your font collection, putting your favorites at your fingertips and tossing the junk. The payoffs are huge:

  • No more wasting hours searching in vain for a font with the right look.
  • No more realizing halfway through a job that the font you chose doesn’t have a glyph you absolutely need.
  • No more sketchy free fonts of dubious origin and quality.

In this session you’ll see how to build and maintain a valuable collection of fonts that’s easy to use and flexible enough to meet any need, with fresh new looks and reliable old standbys.

Designing for the Real World

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Working on a screen all day is one thing, but bringing your work into the physical world and creating with your hands (using something other than a mouse) is something else entirely! Atlanta-based illustrator and muralist, George Baker III, shares what he’s learned from transforming your digital world into real-world, physical designs.

You’ll discover:

  • Why you should step out and create physical products with your digital designs
  • Ways to use your digital tools to create tangible goods (i.e murals, clothing, screen-printed pieces, hand-drawn type, etc.)
  • How to bring a hand-made component into your digital world
  • Infinite ways to traverse back and forth between the digital and analog realms

Three Minutes Max: PowerPoint

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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 PowerPoint 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!

CreativePro Partner Panel: Finding Solutions

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We all know that Adobe makes powerful tools. But these days, the only way to be truly efficient and productive is to think outside the box and look at the ecosystem of services, resources, and third-party tools that are available to you.

Join us for a panel discussion that looks at how to expand efficiency, improve workflows, and plan for a successful future.

Make it Move: Animation in PowerPoint

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PowerPoint’s animation tools are incredibly powerful and capable of far more than you might expect. Veteran PowerPoint instructor Jole Simmons shares his favorite tips and tricks for bringing your deck to life with professional animation techniques.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Embrace animation and learn when it’s appropriate to use it
  • Find ways to simplify concepts by using animation
  • Learn the power of creating and using animated GIFs within PowerPoint
  • Learn how to create amazing showstopper moments using animation
  • Utilize some of PowerPoint’s rarely used animation presets to create cool effects

GREP: You Know You Need This

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GREP is one of the most powerful features in InDesign, but sadly it’s one of the least used! In this introductory session, we’ll get you up to speed with this amazing tool for finding, changing, and formatting text patterns.

We’ll look at some design samples and learn essential GREP techniques, such as:

  • The basics of creating an expression to easily find and format text
  • Finding a range of characters
  • Automatically formatting specific text within a paragraph style, such as fractions, keywords, or a company name

Using After Effects as a Photoshop Plug-in

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If your client asks for something “new” or “out of the box,” take a look at using After Effects. It works just like Photoshop, and can be used for any design project . . . even still images with no video! This session we’ll explore quick-and-easy techniques to create jaw-dropping graphics for any design project.

In this session we’ll remove colors from a photograph, generate editorial graphics for blogs and social media, create amazing lighting effects within a photo, and generate unique textures — from presentations to repeating backgrounds for web pages. And when we’re done, we can send the project back to Photoshop!

You’ll learn:

  • The After Effects interface
  • How After Effects is similar to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign
  • How to import photos, videos, and art into your project
  • Applying effects (it’s all about effects!)
  • Creating original artwork and enhancements
  • Forget AI — create your own unique artwork in minutes!