CreativePro Week 2019 Wrap-up

Erica Gamet

This article appeared in Issue 123 of InDesign Magazine.

Melinda Grant has all the details from the big show in Seattle.

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happened at CreativePro Week 2019 will reach far beyond that one week in Seattle. The idea behind CreativePro Week is for everyone not only to learn and create, but also to share that new knowledge with colleagues. And boy, you can really learn and share a lot when you spend a week with world-class experts and a bunch of like-minded individuals for professional development, networking, and fun. What happens during CreativePro Week is transformative!

The Event

Very few of us work with a single creative application, which is why this five-day mega-conference makes so much sense. Now in its third year as a conference mash-up, CreativePro Week has evolved into a slick, well-oiled machine—from the humble beginnings of the first PePcon in 2010, to merging with the InDesign Conference in 2013, to the creation of the Ps/Ai Conference in 2015, and the addition of Click: The Presentation Design Conference last year. This year’s show in Seattle was the biggest ever in the history of CreativePro events with 950 people in attendance.

CreativePro Week continues to grow each year. 2019’s record attendance was over 950!

Speakers Laurie Ruhllin, Jason Hoppe, and Jole Simmons

The Setup

CreativePro Week took over an entire floor of the Westin Seattle. Because the rooms were closely positioned, attendees could choose their own adventures from a variety of concurrent sessions, as well as decide whether to watch individual sessions entirely or move between a few of interest.

Nobody does their best work on an empty stomach, so conference organizers kept us supplied with fabulous food that was as delicious as it was plentiful. Plus, the goodie bag for attendees came with a very handy drinks cup (which was customizable and reusable), as well as a swag-load of gifts and discount cards.

Your hosts, David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion (center)

The Community

Creative types are a great bunch of people to hang with, and the CreativePro folks make it super easy. Registering for the conference links you into an online conversation with other registered attendees. People use this chat to start networking immediately, arranging transportation, sharing accommodations, and establishing connections with like-minded professionals even before the event begins. During the conference, an old-fashioned community bulletin board and social functions enabled attendees to mingle, laugh, and enjoy finding folks to complete their meet-up bingo cards.

Specialty-themed signposts on the meals tables made it easy to make industry connections, chat about shared issues, and get down to the nitty-gritty details about the stuff that’s important and relevant to your tribe.

The online conversation continued through the conference and was very handy for social meetups, restaurant and sight-seeing recommendations, as well as for asking practical questions, soliciting professional advice, and generally feeling connected right from the conference get-go. For example, I enjoyed following other people’s experiences through their tweets and Instagram posts. And, Jeff Carlson’s photography of the event made everyone look like movie stars.

The Speakers

An international cast of 45 experts brought their real-world knowledge with them to the podiums and panel tables of CreativePro Week. As well as presenting highly informative sessions, these folks were also incredibly accessible—not only encouraging attendees to pick their brains at the speakers’ tables, but also inviting us to connect via social media, to email them directly, or even to just walk up and say “hi.”

Who exactly was there? Lisa Carney, Chris Converse, Laura Coyle, Von Glitschka, and Jesús Ramirez covered creative thinking, illustration, retouching, infographics and web design as part of the Ps/Ai stream.

Laura Coyle offered amazing Illustrator tips and techniques

Mike Rankin was appropriately attired for the Ps/Ai show

Chad Chelius, Erica Gamet, Tony Harmer, Keith Gilbert, and others hosted The InDesign Conference stream, sharing best practices for workflows, interactivity, long documents, animation, styles, and other InDesign magic.

The one and only Tony Harmer

For the PePcon track, Nigel French, Duff Johnson, Keith Gilbert, Dian Holton, and other experts opened us up to such topics as mobile apps, typography, editorial design across platforms, and hidden features in Acrobat.

Click: The Presentation Design Conference attendees saw Richard Goring, Mark Heaps, Julie Terberg, and their peers demonstrate innovative ways to design presentations, visualize data, and access the incredible capabilities that PowerPoint offers—all without a single bullet point in sight!

After that, the developer geeks who walk among us talked all things automation, architecture, and future direction at the Creative Developers Conference.

In addition, Adobe engineers and product managers for the Creative Cloud products were on site, enabling everyone to ask questions from those in the know and have their say about potential future features.

The Content

Short(ish) sessions allowed audience energy levels to stay high and presenters to show us all the good stuff—the best practices, use cases, treasured nuggets, and workarounds that you simply don’t get by reading a book. Longer, three-hour sessions enabled attendees to dive deeper and get their fill of production techniques, accessibility, apps, typography, long documents, and color management.

For the second year, the inclusion of Click: The Presentation Design Conference proved that PowerPoint and its presentation software peers can hold their respective heads high in the world of design and creativity. As presenters showed rich, interactive presentations filled with slick animation and special effects, audience members often remarked, “I had no idea you could do that with PowerPoint!”

With more than 80 sessions in total, there truly was a smorgasbord of goodies for everyone, in areas as diverse as layout, illustration, publishing, retouching, presentation, UX, and scripting. Whether focused on print, digital, or a combination of both, attendees were able to build their skill sets and learn techniques to future-proof their careers. Unlike a trip to Vegas, the return on investment is guaranteed and simply too great to measure.

Extracurricular Events

Some of the best highlights of CreativePro Week can be found outside the main agenda. The Three Minutes Max sessions were more competitive than a game of dodge ball. Speakers lined up and tried to outdo each other with an incredible tip they’d developed, competing for the audience applause like their lives depended on it and generating a ton of inspiration and laughter at the same time.

Keith Gilbert took home the honors of 3 Minute Max Champion

On Tuesday night, the tables were turned: attendees took the stage to become the presenters at the CreativePro Ignite event. The Ignite concept gave attendees the opportunity to showcase projects they’d worked on or share information they’d learned. The kicker was that each presentation had to be 5 minutes long, based on 20 slides that auto-advanced every 15 seconds. There were remarkable presentations covering such diverse topics as truck marketing, the history of Lorum Ipsum, protecting wildlife through the use of graphic design, and developing interactive tour guides using digital publishing tools. Watching these folks show their stuff while racing to keep up with their slides was simultaneously enlightening and comical.

Perhaps best event of all was the celebration of Adobe InDesign’s 20th birthday. Over lunch, attendees enjoyed watching the initial launch video of “a new product called InDesign” and heard how InDesign had been developed to knock QuarkXPress off its desktop publishing perch. Organizers then shared an amazing video complied by Andrew Keith Strauss that highlighted the features of the first two versions of InDesign (and what was lacking), including how the product was built and developed. Although InDesign 1.0 was sparse, seeing how far the product has improved in features and stability over the years was impressive.

Cupcakes with edible InDesign logo’s to celebrate the program’s 20th anniversary

Then, to the beats of Prince’s “1999,” David Blatner welcomed an assembly of InDesign royalty to the stage for a Q&A session that blew our minds. The panel included:

• Terry White, Principal Worldwide Design & Photography Evangelist for Adobe, who’s been working with and sharing all things InDesign from the very beginning
• Michael Ninness, an InDesign Senior Product Manager back in the early days; now a Senior Director of Product at Adobe
• Marsha Rivera, a digital artist from Wizards of the Coast, who provided “the voice of the user” to the InDesign engineers
• Maria Yap, who started working at Adobe on InDesign 1 and became the InDesign 2.0 Product Manager; today she is the VP Digital Imaging at Adobe
• Vinay Pahlajani, the current Group Product Manager for InDesign and Illustrator at Adobe

The 20th anniversary panel recounted InDesign’s early days and looked to the future.

The panel delighted us with stories about the challenges of bringing InDesign into the world, and how the product was received. It’s incredible to think that it took people a while to warm to the totally new way of working, but most who saw it agreed that the potential was huge.

We also had the honor of acknowledging many Adobe staffers from 1999 who worked on the product and launch. It was the first time in years that so many of these people had been together in the same room and was a very special moment of shared pride and admiration.

Final Thoughts

CreativePro Week 2019 was a huge success thanks to the learning, the networking, the collective problem solving, the valuable resources, the fun, and the ever-growing sense of community. As David Blatner said in his presentation on using scripts in InDesign, “If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.” Clearly, the CreativePro folks are doing it right because learning together was lots of fun.