Tag Archive for: illustrator

Certiport Sponsored Lunch Session: Prepare for Adobe Certification

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Take advantage of free Adobe certification testing at CreativePro Week, offered by Certiport. Learn what to expect and how to prepare so you can test with confidence.

Join Chana Messer for a clear, practical breakdown of how the Adobe Certified Professional exams work for Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You will learn what skills are being tested and where to focus your time so you can walk in confident and ready. See why certification matters—how it validates your skills, builds confidence, and helps you stand out.

Show up prepared. Take the test. Leave with a credential that proves what you can do.

Key takeaways:

  • Understand how the Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign certification exams are structured
  • Identify the core skills and domains each exam measures
  • Prepare with focused study strategies, exam guides, and practice resources
  • Know what to expect on test day, including format and timing
  • Learn how certification can strengthen your career and support student learning

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

Discover Your Creative Advantage in Hidden Dimensions

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In this session, Tony Harmer invites you to rethink everyday design challenges by embracing 3D thinking inside familiar Adobe environments. This isn’t about becoming a 3D expert or learning a new pile of tools. It’s about shifting how you think, explore, and experiment—then realizing how much easier and more flexible your design process can be.

You’ll see how thinking in more dimensions can speed up ideation, simplify revisions, and open creative directions that feel surprisingly natural once you stop designing flat. Along the way, Tony makes a fun, eye-opening case for why some of the most powerful design workflows start when designers add depth to their thinking.

You’ll walk away inspired, a little amused, and probably asking yourself, “Wait… why haven’t I been doing this?”

You will learn how to:

  • Overcome graphic design challenges by thinking in dimensions
  • Discover why designing with depth makes changes and revisions easier
  • Adopt a creative mindset that refuses to stay flat

Three Minutes Max: Illustrator

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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 Illustrator 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!

Maintaining Brand Consistency

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In this session, Nicte Cuevas shares how professional designers can build a practical brand system that works for both internal teams and clients. See how to use Creative Cloud Libraries alongside Illustrator, Photoshop, and Adobe Express to create a connected brand ecosystem that supports designers and non-designers alike. Nicte shows how brand assets and brand kits can live across Creative Cloud apps, making updates easier to manage and helping teams stay on brand without constant oversight.

This session focuses on real systems designers can adapt to support teams, streamline workflows, and maintain brand consistency at scale.

Topics include:

  • Build a practical brand system that supports both designers and non-designers
  • Create brand kits that stay in sync across Creative Cloud apps
  • Reduce production cleanup by empowering teams with the right tools and structure

Illustrator Power Techniques

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Illustrator offers an enormous number of tools and options—so the challenge is knowing which ones are worth your attention! In this fast-moving, idea-rich session, Laura Coyle shares her carefully chosen set of Illustrator “power moves” that make a noticeable difference in everyday work.

You’ll see tools and techniques you may have skipped past, shortcuts that save real time, and newer Illustrator features that smooth out common pain points. This fun, focused session is designed to spark new ideas, connect familiar features in smarter ways, and remind you just how much Illustrator can do when you know where to look.

You will learn:

  • Ways to speed up your workflow significantly with custom actions
  • Path editing tips and techniques that sharpen your vector skillset
  • Preference settings, shortcuts, and customizations that remove everyday frustrations
  • Which new features of Illustrator 2026 are useful (and which can be skipped)
  • Standout third-party add-ons that expand Illustrator in smart, practical ways

Photoshop and Illustrator: Playing Nice Together

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Photoshop is amazing of course, but Adobe Illustrator does some things much better. To expand our creative toolkit and the range of looks and styles we can achieve, we can combine Photoshop with its close cousin, Illustrator. By understanding the similarities and the differences of these powerhouse programs, we can take advantage of the strengths of both.

In this session we’ll look at why you would want to move your artwork back and forth between Photoshop and Illustrator and the different ways to do so: copying and pasting, embedding and linking, exporting, as well as sharing via Creative Cloud Libraries. In a series of mini projects, we’ll see how to efficiently harness the synergy between the pixels and vectors.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, an illustrator looking to add a more organic feel to your designs, or a photographer looking to combine your images with type, shapes, or patterns, this session has something for you.

Key takeaways:

  • Moving artwork between Photoshop and Illustrator
  • Understanding the properties of pixels and vectors, their strengths and limitations
  • How Illustrator can be used to extend the capabilities of Photoshop (and vice versa)

Creative Cloud Tips and Tricks to Boost Productivity

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This session is packed with time-saving shortcuts and lesser-known features across Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You’ll learn practical techniques that experienced Adobe users often overlook, including smarter style setups, hidden panels, and efficient cross-app workflows.

You’ll also see how Creative Cloud Libraries can become a central hub for assets, styles, and consistency across projects—saving time and reducing rework. Every tip is designed to make your day-to-day work faster, smoother, and more intentional.

Key takeaways:

  • Learn essential keyboard shortcuts and hidden tricks that save time every day.
  • Choose the right app for the task
  • Reduce repetitive setup work across projects and documents
  • Become a true Creative Cloud “power user” with techniques most other designers don’t know

Illustrator for InDesign Users: You’ve Got This

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You love InDesign: It makes sense. It behaves! But Illustrator? That’s usually a “hold your breath and click carefully” situation. In this session, Tony Harmer helps InDesign power-users feel far more at home inside Illustrator.

You’ll learn how to navigate Illustrator with confidence, spot the features that save time, and stop treating it like a mysterious side quest you only enter under duress.

You will learn how to:

  • Recognize when Illustrator is the better tool before things get messy in InDesign
  • Navigate Illustrator using concepts that already make sense to you
  • Prepare and clean up vector artwork so it behaves predictably in layouts
  • Export individual vector assets quickly and efficiently for real-world use
  • Shift your mindset from “I’ll get through this,” to “I get to do this!”

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