After Effects for Graphic Designers

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After Effects isn’t just for video pros, and it doesn’t have to feel intimidating. With a small set of core concepts, designers can create simple, effective motion that enhances everyday design work.

Learn how to get things moving quickly using familiar assets from Photoshop and Illustrator. Build practical motion skills that deliver immediate results, from adding impact to social content to bringing static layouts to life. Introduce motion into existing design workflows without overcomplicating the process.

This session is for designers who want to add motion to their skill set without changing how they work. You’ll leave with confidence and a clear understanding of how After Effects fits naturally into a design-first workflow.

You will learn:

  • That After Effects is not as scary as you always thought
  • How to quickly create animations with keyframes
  • How to import your Photoshop and Illustrator assets and animate them
  • How to do the cool stuff with video, like tracking motion and cameras
  • How to export your animations

Laying the Foundation: Building Efficient InDesign Layouts

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The choices you make when you start building an InDesign layout will determine how smoothly the rest of the project goes. In this session, Laurie Ruhlin focuses on the foundational layout decisions that make InDesign documents easier to design, revise, and maintain over time.

You’ll learn how thoughtful structure reduces rework, prevents layout breakdowns, and makes everyday tasks far less stressful. This session shows how to set up layouts so they naturally support real-world production needs.

Topics include:

  • Setting things up right from the start so your layout elements align naturally and don’t need constant fixing later
  • Choosing single or facing pages. Learn how each option changes layout, margins, and page management—and why switching later can be messy
  • Using parent pages to build structure, not clutter with consistent headers, footers, guides, and repeating elements
  • Demystifying the Primary Text Frame: What it does, when to use it, and how it makes adding, flowing, and reordering pages effortless
  • Rearranging pages without breaking your layout: Shuffle, insert, and delete pages while keeping text, images, and page structure intact

Accessible PDFs: Mastering the Tags Tree

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For anyone responsible for delivering final accessible PDFs, understanding the Tags Tree is essential to ensuring content is readable, navigable, and usable with assistive technology.

In this session, Chad Chelius explains how the PDF Tags Tree defines document structure and reading order, and why it is central to effective PDF accessibility. You’ll see where common accessibility issues originate and how to evaluate and correct them in Acrobat. The focus is on understanding how tags work and how tagging decisions affect real users.

Key takeaways:

  • Understand what the PDF Tags Tree represents and why it is the foundation of PDF accessibility
  • Document remediation techniques
  • Identify and correct reading order issues using the Tags Tree
  • Evaluate existing PDFs to spot common structural accessibility problems
  • Make informed tagging decisions that improve usability for assistive technology users

Reinventing Yourself Through Digital Collage

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Follow along in a creative exploration of identity, transformation, and visual storytelling. In this session, Guillermo invites you into his collage-driven process, blending analog techniques with digital tools to rethink how images, portraits, and surfaces can evolve.

You’ll see how cutting, layering, drawing, and texture reshape an image, then how those ideas translate into a digital workflow using Photoshop and AI-assisted experimentation.

Expect inspiration, process insights, and permission to play. You’ll leave with fresh ways of thinking about collage, identity, and transformation—plus ideas you can adapt and explore further in your own professional work.

You will learn how to:

  • Adopt a more playful, exploratory mindset for your professional and personal creative work
  • Recognize how texture, and layering shape meaning and identity
  • Observe how tactile experimentation can translate into digital workflows

Why Your Print File Failed (and How to Fix It)

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Print files fail for reasons that aren’t always obvious, even to experienced designers. Amybeth Menendez breaks down why print problems happen and how to prevent them. Learn how transparency settings, ICC profiles, and PDF standards interact, and where issues most often appear. Amybeth focuses on real-world scenarios designers face every day, explaining what’s happening behind the scenes and how to fix problems with clarity and confidence.

You’ll leave feeling more in control of your files, better equipped to catch potential issues early, and ready to send print-ready PDFs with confidence.

Key takeaways:

  • Take a deep dive into transparency and flattening settings
  • Identify common ICC profile and color management pitfalls
  • Spot warning signs before a file goes to press
  • Demystify PDF export choices for print

Cinematic Presentations: Creating Dynamic, Immersive Content

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The best presentations make a lasting impression on your audience and change their behavior. To do that, you need to engage, inspire, and motivate. PowerPoint offers some terrific techniques to do just that.

In this session, you’ll see how to create dynamic and immersive content, suitable for viewing anywhere from a small laptop to a huge ballroom. You’ll see how to deliver mesmerizing experiences for your audience by coordinating with presenters, camera teams, and graphic ops. Pick and choose the techniques to apply to your own content and adapt them to your brand.

All roads lead to PowerPoint, but where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

Key takeaways:

  • Transform your slides with techniques for dynamic and immersive content delivery
  • Think outside the slide to create unique effects
  • Incorporate external elements such as cameras and staging into the presentation

InDesign Styles: Beyond Text Formatting and Into Design

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Styles are often treated as basic text formatting—fonts, sizes, spacing, alignment—but they can do far more. Built into styles are powerful design features like borders, shading, rules, and corner effects that let you create callouts, highlights, dividers, and branded design elements directly inside your layouts.

This session shows how to design with styles to create layouts that are both consistent and visually strong. You’ll see how paragraph shading can create instant callouts, how borders and rules add structure and emphasis, how character and object styles work together, and how table styles carry brand identity into complex layouts. The result is cleaner files, fewer formatting errors, faster updates, and more creative control—without extra work.

You will learn how to:

  • Make styles part of your design system, not just a formatting step
  • Reduce production risk when collaborating or handing files to other designers
  • Reduce manual formatting and errors in long or complex documents
  • Ideal for designers who work in InDesign regularly and want cleaner, smarter, more flexible layouts

Smart Color Decisions for Accessible Design

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Color choices affect far more than aesthetics. They shape readability, clarity, hierarchy, and whether people can actually use what you design. In this session, Dax Castro shows how to make smarter, more intentional color decisions that support accessibility without flattening creativity or forcing dull, “safe” palettes.

This session focuses on building awareness and confidence—so your color choices work for more people, more of the time.

You will learn how to:

  • Make confident color choices that balance accessibility and visual impact
  • Understand how contrast, hierarchy, and color meaning affect usability
  • Evaluate color decisions in real-world design scenarios
  • Apply practical color strategies that work across print and digital designs

Adobe Bridge: Practical, Hands-On Workflows

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When your files are scattered, productivity takes a hit. This session shows why understanding Adobe Bridge matters—and how it can simplify the way you work with creative assets.

In this hands-on workshop, Melissa Piccone introduces Bridge as a visual command center for your files. You’ll see how it helps you stay organized, move faster, and maintain clarity across complex projects. The emphasis is on practical efficiency: reducing friction, minimizing context switching, and building confidence managing real-world file collections.

Leave with a clear understanding of what Bridge does, how it fits into Creative Cloud workflows, and why it’s a tool every creative professional should understand.

Topics include:

  • See, filter, and sort files across multiple folders at once
  • Organize faster with a two-window Bridge workflow
  • Batch rename, convert, and process files with confidence
  • Collect and manage InDesign-linked assets using Bridge

PowerPoint’s Vector Toolkit: Built for Designers

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Leave aside your pixels, your JPEGs, and your PNGs, and dive into all that PowerPoint can do with vector content. In this session, you’ll shift your mindset from pixels to paths and learn how to build graphics that stay editable, scalable, and lightweight.

Explore how PowerPoint handles shapes, illustrations, icons, charts, and type as true vector objects. This session will get you using PowerPoint more like Illustrator and less like Photoshop to create dynamic and editable graphics while keeping file size to a minimum. You’ll walk away with concrete techniques for creating cleaner, more flexible graphics that hold up in real-world PowerPoint workflows.

You will learn how to:

  • Draw and refine custom shapes using Bezier curves and PowerPoint’s shape-editing tools
  • Combine, subtract, and intersect shapes using PowerPoint’s pathfinder-style commands
  • Gain more control over type, SVGs, and charts by converting them to pure vector shapes
  • Learn the best techniques and file formats for icons, logos, and illustrations