The Design + Marketing Summit 2026

You’re being asked to create more than ever. More ideas. More variations. More content. AI makes that easier—and harder at the same time. The real challenge isn’t production. It’s knowing what to make and how to keep your work focused and intentional when the tools available can take you in a thousand different directions.

In this session, Vincent Wanga looks at what creative direction means in today’s marketing environment. Learn how to set intent early, guide cross-functional teams, and make decisions that keep work aligned with both brand and business goals. See how strong leadership shapes better campaigns, aligns teams, and keeps work grounded in purpose—not just speed.

Walk away with a practical perspective on where leadership has the greatest impact and how to lead creative work that connects, resonates, and delivers results.

Key takeaways:

• Identify where human judgment has the greatest impact on marketing outcomes.
• Create clarity and direction when faced with endless creative options.
• Align marketing and design teams around a clear creative vision.
• Lead collaborative workflows that balance speed, quality, and brand consistency.

You’re not just designing a logo—you’re shaping how a brand shows up in the world. Purpose, personality, and culture become the visual language that guides how that brand communicates and connects.

In this session, Nicte Cuevas shows how to define and express the human side of a brand while building systems teams can actually use. Learn how purpose, voice, and audience insight shape design decisions, from color and typography to imagery and tone.

Explore how Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Express help you create and manage brand assets, guidelines, and templates that keep teams aligned and working efficiently. Through examples and practical demonstrations, see how brand strategy becomes visual systems that support everyday design and marketing work.

Key takeaways:

• Define brand purpose, voice, and personality to guide design decisions
• Translate brand values and culture into a cohesive visual identity system
• Build brand assets and guidelines that reflect how your brand communicates
• Create scalable templates that support marketing teams
• Use Illustrator, InDesign, and Adobe Express to manage brand systems

PROJECT-BASED SESSION

We’re all seeing more AI-generated visuals in our day-to-day work. As more brands lean into them, marketing campaigns are starting to look and feel the same. Designers who bring visible human craft into their work can help brands stop “the scroll” by standing out with visuals that feel authentic, distinctive, and memorable.

In this session, explore how handmade illustration, patterns, and textures can become powerful brand assets that support storytelling and bring personality to marketing visuals across digital and print campaigns.

Discover how a human touch in design creates visuals that feel more personal, memorable, and uniquely tied to a brand.

You’ll learn how to:

• Draw simple handcrafted illustrations with marker pens, Adobe Illustrator, or Photoshop
• Create simple, repeatable patterns that can become distinctive brand elements
• Create textures for Photoshop or Illustrator artwork
• Create handwritten letterforms

You’re expected to produce a steady stream of campaign graphics, social posts, ads, and presentations. Keeping up means finding smarter ways for designers and marketers to work together. In this session, you’ll learn how InDesign and Adobe Express can scale marketing content across teams.

You’ll see how designers can create structured layouts and templates in InDesign that become flexible, reusable assets inside Express. Marketing teams can update messaging, adapt content, and create new variations while designers maintain control of the core design. Explore a collaborative workflow that helps teams move faster, produce more content, and keep designers focused on high-value creative work.

Topics include:

• Building layouts in InDesign that translate into flexible Adobe Express templates
• Creating collaborative workflows that allow marketing teams to update and adapt content
• Managing template structures so teams can safely create variations and new deliverables
• Moving designs between Express and InDesign, bringing Express-created content back into InDesign for advanced layout and production work

Chances are, you’ve already been asked to work in Canva—or you will be soon. Clients don’t always use the same tools you do, and increasingly, Canva is part of that reality. As a professional designer, that shift changes how you prepare, deliver, and manage your work.

In this session, explore how a professional designer approaches Canva in real client work. See where it fits, how it impacts file prep and handoff, and what it takes to maintain quality when others are editing your designs. This session takes a practical, grounded look at using Canva as part of the design process.

You’ll leave with a clear perspective on how to work with Canva while protecting your process, your standards, and your client relationships.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify where Canva fits within a professional design workflow
• Prepare files and layouts for client editing without losing control of your design
• Set expectations with clients who rely on Canva for ongoing use
• Recognize the strengths and limitations of Canva in real-world projects
• Make informed decisions about when to use Canva (and when not to)

You love print, but you don’t know if you have the budget to use it in your campaigns, right? Take heart! In this practical session, explore what’s possible in print today, across a wide spectrum of budgets. Learn how different print techniques influence your audience and how to choose approaches that align with your project goals.

Through real-world examples, Sabine Lenz will show you how the same design objective can be achieved in multiple ways—from short-run solutions to higher-volume production. See how production choices shape the final piece and support your marketing outcomes.

You’ll leave empowered by knowing that you can elevate a printed piece without overbuilding or overspending.

This session is for working designers and marketing teams who want to create impactful print while staying grounded in real client constraints and budget realities.

Topics include:

• Understanding what print techniques are possible today across different budgets
• Exploring multiple ways to achieve the same design outcome
• Matching production approaches to project goals and audience experience
• Making print decisions that support real marketing results

You already have the data. The challenge is figuring out what it means and how to communicate that clearly.

In this session, Valentina D’Efilippo shares how she approaches data as a designer, looking beyond charts to uncover meaning, shape a narrative, and communicate ideas in a way people understand. You’ll learn how to identify patterns, ask better questions, and move from raw information to a clear, purposeful story.

Through real examples, Valentina shows how her process helps audiences understand, connect with, and act on information—not just see it.

You’ll learn about:

• The steps to find a story in your data
• The frameworks to transform raw data into stunning and unique forms, far beyond conventional graphs
• Data and design’s role in shaping perceptions
• The importance of acknowledging biases in your work

PROJECT-BASED SESSION

You probably use Adobe Acrobat every day to open, review, and share PDFs. Most of the time, those files stay static: final exports that get sent and forgotten. But they can do much more. With the right approach, PDFs become interactive, multimedia-rich documents designed to guide, present, and persuade.

In this session, you’ll learn how to create interactive PDFs for client presentations, pitch decks, proposals, and leave-behinds. Turn everyday documents into structured, engaging experiences that support storytelling and make complex content easier to navigate.

Make your PDFs communicate more effectively. Guide your audience, highlight what matters, and turn passive documents into purposeful experiences.

Topics include:

• Creating interactive-ready elements in InDesign, including internal and external links, bookmarks, and structured navigation
• Embedding audio and video directly into PDFs for richer presentations and client deliverables
• Using Acrobat to enhance client presentations, proposals, and portfolios without redesigning from scratch
• Securing client files with password protection and permission controls, including disabling printing and copying

You start with one campaign idea. Then it turns into dozens of deliverables across print, email, web, and social. Every piece needs to stay aligned, even as formats and requirements change.

In this session, Chris Converse shows the practical side of campaign production. Using techniques with your favorite Adobe apps and AI tools, Chris demonstrates how to build out a coordinated set of campaign assets from an existing brand system. Learn how adaptable layouts, reusable design elements, and organized assets make it possible to efficiently produce marketing materials that support an omnichannel marketing campaign.

See how to maintain a consistent visual language across formats and platforms. Walk away with practical ideas you can apply to your own campaign work.

You’ll learn how to:

• Translate a campaign concept into coordinated assets across print, email, web, and social
• Adapt layouts so one design system works across multiple formats and platforms
• Reuse design elements to maintain visual consistency across campaign materials
• Organize and manage assets for faster, more efficient campaign production
• Apply brand guidelines to maintain a consistent visual language across channels

Typography shapes how your message is felt before it’s read. Type can whisper, shout, persuade, and even mislead.

In this session, join internationally renowned type superstar Ina Saltz to explore the expressive power of type. See how type choices carry personality, set tone, and define voice across everything you create. Move beyond safe defaults and make deliberate typographic decisions that bring clarity, meaning, and impact to your work.

This isn’t about rules or formulas. It’s about developing a sharper instinct for what type is saying so you can communicate with greater intention and confidence.

You’ll learn how to:

• Make more confident, intentional typographic decisions in your marketing work
• Choose type that aligns with your message and brand voice
• Recognize whether your typography is reinforcing your intent or working against it
• Use expressive type to create impact while maintaining clarity and readability

If direct mail isn’t part of your campaigns, it’s worth a second look. What used to feel expensive and hard to measure has evolved into something far more targeted and effective. This session shows how modern direct mail works and why it’s delivering results.

Learn how targeted mailing lists, buyer data, and variable data printing allow campaigns to reach the right audience with personalized messaging. Review real examples that show how thoughtful design and smart targeting can turn a simple mail piece into a powerful marketing tool. Gain a clearer understanding of how modern direct mail programs are planned, measured, and executed—and how strong design supports successful campaigns.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use targeted mailing lists and buyer data to reach the right audience
• Apply variable data and personalization to increase response rates
• Design mail pieces that capture attention and encourage action
• Recognize key production and postal considerations that influence campaign success

In this practical, workflow-driven session, you’ll learn how to turn a single video or image into a full suite of high-performing marketing assets. Instead of starting from scratch for every platform, we’ll walk through a repeatable system for identifying key moments, extracting short-form clips, and adapting them for social media and brand campaigns.

Using tools like Adobe Express, Premiere, Illustrator, Firefly, Adobe Podcast, and AI-assisted workflows, you’ll see how to dramatically increase output while maintaining design quality and brand consistency.

Whether you’re a designer, marketer, or content creator, this session will help you move faster, work smarter, and create content that actually connects.

What you’ll learn:

• How to plan and capture video content with repurposing in mind
• A repeatable system for identifying high-value “content moments.”
• Efficient workflows for turning one video (or image) into multiple assets
• How to adapt content for different platforms without starting over
• Ways to use Adobe tools and AI to speed up production without sacrificing quality