Chris Ryland founded Em Software in 1990, and has been president since then, doing the original development (much less these days, mostly marketing, product management, sales, and some support). His main job is supportingEm’s three crackerjack development and application engineers. The Em folk have been working from home forever (before it was cool ;-). Before Em, he ran the kernel development group at Multiflow, a Yale spinoff mini-supercomputer startup, and, before that, was a founding member of couple of Silicon Valley startups.

Roger Black is known for his sense of typography, which he’s applied in the design of has worked with magazines like Rolling Stone, newspapers like The Washington Post and web sites like the first MSNBC.com. He was a founder of one of the early desktop type design studios, Font Bureau (1989), and is now chairman of Type Network, an agency and distributor for type designers.

Many publications designed decades ago, such as the Los Angeles Times, continue to use his typography. He was an early adopter of desktop publishing, and then of web sites, for his clients.

Roger has advocated using distinct type for each title. Many original fonts and revivals of classic faces have been produced by him and his teams over the years. Some of the interesting case studies were gathered in a digital brochure at Type Network’s site, “The Roger Black Collection.”

Clients have included Reader’s Digest, Esquire, Scientific American, Premiere, Fast Company, Foreign Affairs, Hong Kong Tatler (and the other Tatler magazines in Asia) Panorama (Italy). Semana (Colombia) and The Nation (Thailand). Newspaper work includes the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Toronto Star, Tages Anzeiger (Zurich), Kompas (Jakarta) and the Straits Times (Singapore).

In 1968 he was editor of The Maroon, the student newspaper at the University of Chicago. After serving as chief art director of New York, The New York Times, and Newsweek, he started his own design firm in 1987. He’s been recognized with top awards from the Society of News Design and the Society of Publication Designers.

Roger lives in St. Pete Beach, Florida, and in the Texas Big Bend. Now 72 and working fulltime for Type Network, he’s active in building communities of people who love type. He organized the first big conferences for the Type Directors Club (TDC), Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI), and started TYPE magazine, an online publication that has produced four print editions, and is planning No. 5 for later this year.

Inexhaustible curiosity and an analytical, data-driven mindset landed Sean in his dream engineering job at 3M. Seriously, he was hooked ever since seeing 3M Visiting Wizards play with fire liquid nitrogen in 3rd grade. Sean is the lead application engineer for 3M Visual Attention Software and product engineer for Scotch brand consumer crafting products. He is incredibly excited to work with emerging AI and MR technologies and see how they will impact the creative field. Outside of work, he enjoys weightlifting, hiking, running a D&D campaign, and most importantly, hanging out with his 9-month old puppy.

Jeannine Armbruster is an award-winning designer, director, and teacher. Currently, she steers the creative ship as Agency Director at Puffingston Presentations, an award-winning presentation design agency in Austin, TX.

Since 2008, she has served on both agency and in-house design teams, and from 2014-2018 she ran her independent design practice, Fourth Story, where she specialized in designing websites and brands for startups.

An educator at heart, Jeannine has taught art and design since 2010 and has built programs for schools in NYC, Brooklyn, and Austin, including Columbia University’s Say Yes to Education and the Mary McDowell Friends School. Most recently, she had the privilege of designing and overseeing the full Visual Arts program at The Austin School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Jeannine volunteers as the Director of Design and Technology for International Student Learning, a nonprofit that unites students globally and provides education and support to students in underserved countries.

At any given time, you might find her bookbinding, woodworking, or teaching high school students how to create prosthetic zombie limbs. Ask her about it sometime.

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“I am a Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom Tutor, Photo Editor, and Digital Artist, living in Los Angeles, CA. I went to art college in Boston, MA and was a Fine Art major. I then started working for art galleries and artists in NYC, then in the early 90s after taking some computer graphics courses at School of Visual Arts I fell in love with Photoshop, I then built up my portfolio and registered with creative temp agencies – which then got me in the door for various Advertising agencies doing photo compositing, retouching, and image production work. I then moved to San Francisco for the last year of the dot com boom and lived there for 4 years before moving to Los Angeles where I balance my time freelancing and running my groups on Facebook and my club on Clubhouse.”

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