Laurie Ruhlin

Laurie Ruhlin

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Laurie is an Adobe Certified Instructor in InDesign and Illustrator and an active user of many of the Creative Cloud programs in her graphic design business. She provides classroom and custom training both live and online as a consultant. This will be her seventh CreativePro Week as a speaker.

In addition to her teaching and speaking, she is a graphic designer, developing brochures, catalogs, newsletters, logos and interactive documents for a wide variety of clients. She is the author of a course for Ajar Productions – Creating your First Interactive Document with InDesign and in5. She is a writer for InDesign Magazine and has several videos on the InDesign Secrets YouTube channel. From her diverse graphic design and consulting work, Laurie brings a wide variety of real-world knowledge into the classroom.

Website | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

Jeff Witchel

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Jeff Witchel is a self-taught computer artist with over 30 years of experience. His initial introduction to the computer was with PageMaker, but he switched to Quark 1.0 when it was first introduced in 1987. Having arrived on the desktop publishing scene so early, Jeff became a “go to” guy for answers when others started getting into computer graphics.

Today Jeff is an Adobe Certified Instructor for InDesign and Illustrator, with training clients across the USA. He’s best known for his tips and tricks video tutorials, which you can view on his training website at JeffWitchel.net. Jeff is also Adobe’s Co-Representative to the InDesign User Group of NJ, an Adobe Community Professional, who answers questions on the Adobe Forums, and an Adjunct Professor at Kean University, Robert Busch School of Design.

Jeff wrote “Layers Magazine Tip of the Day” for five years (2005–2009), which were emailed to 20,000 subscribers every weekday. The best of the InDesign tips were compiled into an book, The Best of Layers Magazine Tips of the Day. He also wrote for Illustrator Techniques magazine (Kelby), InDesign Magazine, the CreativePro website, and InDesignSecrets. Over the years, Jeff has produced many Adobe training videos for Magnet Media in New York and Infinite Skills (O’Reilly).

Jeff’s sessions:

    Bill Jelen

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    Bill Jelen is the host of MrExcel.com and the author of 61 books about Microsoft Excel including Excel Gurus Gone Wild, Pivot Table Data Crunching, and Excel 2019 Inside Out. He has made over 80 guest appearances on TV’s Call for Help with Leo Laporte and was voted guest of the year on the Computer America radio show. Jelen joins us from Merritt Island, Florida.

    Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube

    Khara Plicanic

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    A camera slinging design geek and Adobe nerd, Khara’s a natural born teacher who’s been sharing inspiration & know-how with fellow creatives around the globe for more than 15 years. Khara’s proud to have authored several books for Peach Pit and Rocky Nook Press and enjoys contributing to CreativePro Magazine. When she’s not presenting at creative industry events, making futile attempts at reclaiming hard drive space, or searching the sofa cushions for a runaway Wacom pen, Khara can be found plotting her next craft project, catching up with her favorite late night hosts, or trying to remember where she left her phone.

    Website | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn

    Bill Carberry

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    Bill Carberry has been using and teaching Adobe InDesign as an Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor for Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop in good standing since 1999. He has a commercial printing background and enjoys providing simple solutions to complex problems, especially solving stubborn font problems.

    Bill’s session:

      Ferdinand Schwörer

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      Ferdinand is the developer of MathTools, the only Equation Editor for Adobe InDesign and InCopy that is entirely based on InDesign’s type engine. Major scholarly, academic and STM publisher use MathTools, formerly known as InMath, for many years. He is the founder of movemen GmbH, specialised in InDesign Plug-In development and developer training. Ferdinand gave various technical presentations concerning InDesign and InDesign Server SDK.

      Ferdinand’s sessions:

        Briar Levit

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        Briar Levit is an assistant professor of graphic design at Portland State University, and holds a master’s in communication design from Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in the UK. She came up as a designer in San Francisco in the late 1990s, and missed the cold type era by just a few years.

        Briar cut her teeth as a designer working in-house for Discovery Channel Stores, and not long after that became art director at magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Her graphic design focus and practice consists primarily of publication design, with a special interest in independent publishing, small presses, and hiking guides (a few of which she has self-published).

        Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production was a significant jump out of her comfort zone—but once the idea came to her, it simply wouldn’t go away. She has been working on the film since 2014, while teaching design full time.

        Briar’s session:

          Joe Crocenzi

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Sr. Product Manager 
Blurb, Inc.

          Joe has been involved in print and InDesign prepress work for over 20 years, helping designers and graphic artists overcome the technical challenges of publishing. Passionate about InDesign and high-quality print products, he is most at home when helping creatives bring their best ideas to life on the pages of beautiful books.

          Joe’s sessions:

            Coletta Perry

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            Coletta Perry is Avatar DPS’s CEO as well as their lead solutions designer. She has been automating production processes since the early 80’s. As is currently the case with Avatar, her former typesetting company, the Copyfitters, built an enviable reputation for knowing how to handle the most difficult jobs. It also pioneered the use of the earliest data-to-typography hardware and software along with a programming language that made it possible to create in-place pages at a time when others were still cutting and pasting.

            Coletta was a very early adopter of desktop publishing – having worked with Ventura Publisher, PageMaker, Quark, FrameMaker and a few others that have faded into oblivion… and, of course, InDesign.

            Avatar DPS has helped hundreds of organizations of all sizes successfully adopt data-to-design processes over the last 20 years. Coletta’s long experience and thorough understanding of both sides of the equation — the data AND the design — give her and her team critical advantages when connecting the dots to create powerful solutions for their clients.

            Coletta’s sessions:

              Bevi Chagnon

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              Half designer and half geek, Bevi Chagnon is 100% percent teacher when the topic is accessible documents. She’s a prolific writer on melding accessibility into graphic design, website development, publishing, digital media, and cross-media technologies.

              Bevi is accomplished in many design disciplines (magazine art director, graphic designer, web developer, digital media developer, photographer, and architect) and has mastered many of today’s computer technologies.

              If it involves communication in any format — traditional and digital, MS Office to Adobe Creative Suite — she’s a master.

              Bevi is a technologist and information architect to fellow designers, publishers, government agencies, education K–higher ed, and enterprises, and guides them to make their published content gorgeous, successful, and accessible. She loves her job!

              She is a U.S. global delegate to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for PDF standards, including PDF/UA (universal accessibility). Through this volunteer work, she contributes to the development of accessibility standards that are used worldwide for documents. She has also is a former contributor to the WCAG guidelines for web accessibility, the original “web standards” that pre-dates WCAG, and EPUB standards.

              You can catch Bevi on public accessibility forums, as well as on Adobe’s user forums where she is an Adobe Community Professional.

              Website | LinkedIn