Steve Laskevitch is lead instructor and founder of Luminous Works, the only Adobe Authorized Training Center in the northwestern United States. He is an Adobe Certified Expert (and Adobe Certified Instructor) in Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, and InDesign.

While studying as a physics undergraduate, Steve was invited to instruct a few courses and immediately fell in love with teaching. He discovered his creative passions while learning photography and designing posters and flyers for the organizations he led in college. The worlds of graphic design and photography led him merrily away from a career in physics.

Steve has spent the 21st century both teaching and doing desktop publishing and building production workflows for many companies and individuals. He’s taught at Cornish College of the Arts (where he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award), University of Washington Professional & Continuing Education (nominated for their Excellence in Teaching Award), and Seattle Central College. 

Steve regularly helped Adobe Systems prepare Certified Expert exams, and for nearly five years he led the InDesign User Group in Seattle, InDesign’s birthplace. Now he’s Luminous Works’ curriculum director and lead instructor and author of Adobe InDesign CC: A Complete Course and Compendium of Features and several Photoshop books. 

Steve is obsessed with New Haven-style pizza. Don’t tell, but the best of that is to be had in Portland, Oregon. Despite this fact, he lives with his wife in Seattle.

Steve’s session:

Thomas Phinney is The Font Detective, as well as CEO of FontLab, the company whose font design tools have been used to create most of the world’s retail fonts. He is a type designer (Adobe Original Hypatia Sans, Cristoforo), and was the first Adobe employee to have both design and technology patents (four so far). A “big three” auto maker and a major California city are among his many expert witness clients. Last year Thomas gave sworn testimony in a lawsuit against Justin Timberlake and Will.I.Am. He has also been consulted on questioned documents by The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, PBS television’s History Detectives, BBC News, NPR, the US Treasury, and many others. Since 2004, Thomas has served on the board of ATypI, the global typographic organization. Preparation for his career included an MS in printing and typography from the Rochester (NY) Institute of Technology, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

You can learn more about Thomas on thomasphinney.com or @ThomasPhinney

Thomas’ session:

Motion Infographic designer Jessica Bellamy, of Louisville Kentucky, tells visual stories using data and personal narratives. As a Design Justice advocate, Jessica started her design career working with nonprofits and community groups to create compelling explainers that break down complex service and policy information. In 2017, she created a hands-on workshop called Infographics for Social Change: A Graphic Ally Hackathon. Since then, she has given Graphic Ally Hackathons at several conferences and at three major universities (Carnegie Mellon, UCLA, and Yale). The hackathon focuses on teaching creatives how to make information graphics in partnership with nonprofits. You can learn more about Jessica on her website, her YouTube channel, or follow her on Instagram or on Twitter.

Jessica’s sessions:

After 20 years in advertising, Sandee Cohen began teaching computer graphics and layout. In 1999 she was approached by Adobe Systems to beta test K-2 which was released as Adobe InDesign. From there she wrote the first InDesign Visual Quickstart Guide.

In addition to authoring the InDesign VQS, she has written Creating Animations with Adobe InDesign CC, and is the co-author, with Diane Burns, of Digital Publishing with InDesign CC. She has also created a course for Lynda.com on the three Adobe Spark programs.

Sandee’s session: