Beyond Compositing: Creative Workflows Powered by AI

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In this session, you’ll explore practical, cross-application techniques that blend Photoshop with AI-driven workflows. You’ll also see how exploratory and experimental approaches can spark new ideas and push composites beyond conventional solutions. Learn how familiar design skills translate into more flexible and expressive workflows when combined with technologies such as Firefly and Firefly Boards. Expect practical examples and inspiring ideas that go beyond a single tool, helping you rethink how you design and create.

You’ll learn:

  • How to build AI-powered workflows across tools like Photoshop and Illustrator
  • Ways to move beyond compositing using cross-tool techniques
  • How tools like Firefly, Firefly Boards, and other new tools fit into everyday design work
  • Creative approaches to explore ideas, iterate, and spark new directions with (and without) AI

The Power of Print: Amplifying Your Marketing Impact

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In an increasingly digital-first world, print has become more powerful, not less! In this session, Vicki Strull reframes how marketers and designers think about print, showing why physical experiences now carry more weight, credibility, and memorability than ever before.

Drawing from decades of Sappi’s publishing and print strategy work, Vicki explores how print captures attention, builds trust, and drives action in ways screens alone can’t. The focus is on modern, intentional print design—aligned with real business goals and crafted to stand out in a crowded marketing landscape.

Key takeaways:

  • Strengthen consumer trust and authenticity
  • Cut through digital overload
  • Pair print with digital channels for stronger ROI
  • Create luxury experiences that engage all the senses
  • Build brand loyalty through tangible connections

Welcome Reception

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Join us for drinks, nibbles, and a fun opportunity to meet the speakers and your fellow attendees!

AI Roundtable Discussion

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You have questions… let’s discuss them! We’ve assembled the perfect blend of experts—professional creatives who were both early AI adopters and who have worked with some of the world’s best known brands. We’ll explore the fears, rumors, assumptions, and predictions we’ve all been talking about.

Speakers: Mark Heaps, Amy Balliet, Amybeth Menendez

Three Minutes Max: Photoshop

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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 Photoshop 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!

Embracing a Punk Rock Attitude for Modern Design

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You can design stronger, clearer work by questioning assumptions and designing with intent. In this session, Michael Mondragon shares a mindset-driven approach to modern design rooted in clarity, purpose, and judgment.

Using a “punk rock” attitude as a metaphor—not a visual style!—Michael challenges autopilot thinking, over-templated solutions, and trend-chasing. The focus is on making deliberate design decisions that serve the message, not the tool, template, or shortcut.

This session helps designers push back on defaults, trust their creative instincts, and create work that communicates more clearly, confidently, and memorably in today’s fast, AI-assisted design landscape.

You will learn to:

  • Make intentional typography choices and find the right fonts
  • Make non-destructive image enhancements in Photoshop
  • Create textures from your own images
  • Style and modify letter forms in Illustrator
  • Bring it all together in InDesign

Making Confident Color Choices in Illustrator

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In Illustrator, color flexibility and creativity go hand in hand, making it easy to explore ideas, tweak palettes, and revamp color as your design evolves. But with Illustrator’s incredible spectrum of color tools at your fingertips, how do you know which features move your work forward, and which leave you, hours later, still spinning your color wheels?

In this session, Laura Coyle shares her practical, creative approach to working with color in Adobe Illustrator. You’ll learn go-to ways to spark inspiration and land on that perfect color you’ve been searching for. And when you need a flexible process that supports last-minute changes or adapting a design for different outputs, Laura will show you how to keep things moving without losing momentum.

You’ll explore:

  • Using Color Groups, Libraries, and Recolor Artwork to spark color ideas
  • Refining palettes and sharing color swatches with your team
  • Building color workflows that support quick changes and multiple versions
  • Adapting color for print and social media as your project needs change
  • What’s new and most colorfully useful in Illustrator 2026

Adobe or Affinity? Why Not Both?

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For most professional designers, Adobe Creative Cloud is the undisputed king. No one wants to dump the tools, workflows, and skills they’ve used over their entire careers. But what if you didn’t have to ditch Adobe to take advantage of some uniquely powerful features in Affinity? Wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds? Can these two bitter rivals coexist on your desktop (or iPad)?

Sure they can! In this session, you’ll discover how to leverage the unique strengths of Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher to supplement your existing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign projects. Instead of a replacement for Creative Cloud, start thinking of Affinity as an amazingly powerful add-on to boost your existing workflow.

Whether you are looking to overcome technical hurdles or just want a fresh creative spark, you’ll walk away with a practical ideas for integrating these two ecosystems into a single, high-performance workflow.

You will learn how to:

  • Generate unique textures and 3D-style lighting effects using with non-destructive Live Filter layers (no Smart Objects needed!)
  • Retouch photos faster with Built-in Frequency Separation and Cross-Mode Live Curves
  • Use Designer’s Pixel Persona to add hand-drawn depth to Illustrator assets
  • Access PANTONE color libraries
  • Send your designs directly to colleagues using Canva
  • And more!

Hidden Photoshop Features Designers Love

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Photoshop is packed with powerful features that are rarely discussed, yet professionals rely on them every day.

In this session, Jesús Ramirez pulls back the curtain on lesser-known Photoshop tools, features, and techniques that can dramatically improve your design workflow. These are not tricks for the sake of tricks. Each feature solves a real problem or saves real time.

If you already know the basics and want to work more like a pro, this class focuses on the details that separate casual users from advanced, efficient designers.

You’ll learn:

  • Use hidden Photoshop features that simplify complex tasks
  • Build stronger, cleaner composites with professional techniques
  • Work smarter with tools you may not be using
  • And much more!

Join Jesús for a free Webinar: Photoshop Power Hour, Tuesday, May 5 at 10 am Pacific

Crafting Custom Lettering and Fonts with Photoshop

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Don’t limit your type choices to the font menu! In this session, you’ll learn how to create expressive, custom lettering and DIY fonts directly inside Photoshop using hand-drawn, painted, or otherwise found letterforms. We’ll explore how to capture your lettering, refine it with Photoshop’s tools, and turn it into flexible typographic assets you can reuse across projects—even in InDesign and other apps! Along the way, you’ll develop a greater appreciation for font design and all that goes into a well-crafted font. This session is perfect for designers with a love for fonts—and the curiosity to explore creating their own.

Takeaways:

  • Techniques for creating custom lettering and DIY fonts in Photoshop
  • Tips for consistency, spacing, and reuse across designs
  • Several different routes to bring your very own fonts to life
  • New ways to think about typography as a creative, hands-on process
  • Learn how you can also build vector fonts in Adobe Illustrator