CreativePro Week 2023 is coming to Phoenix, Arizona from June 5-9, 2023! With over 70 sessions bursting with practical, how-to info for creative professionals, delivered by world-class speakers in an amazing venue, it’s a gathering unlike any other.
If you’re a creative professional, you don’t want to miss a minute of it. But with so much awesomeness packed into five days, you will inevitably have to make some tough choices. So, I feel like it’s my duty to highlight a few of the sessions that I can’t wait to check out. See the agenda for a full listing of all the sessions and speakers.
Generative AI: Ethical, Legal, and Practical Issues
David Blatner, Monika Gause, Micah Burke, Lisa Carney
Forget about rocks, you’d have to be living under a mountain range to have missed the enormous buzz that generative AI websites have been getting recently. It’s unprecedented and incredibly powerful technology. And with that power comes the responsibility to wield it ethically. For every ardent proponent of generative AI, there’s an artist who feels ripped off by it. Whichever side you come down on, one thing’s clear: The impacts of generative AI on creative industries (and society in general) will be deeply felt, so it is imperative that we creative professionals have an understanding of its workings and effects. Discussions like this will help us achieve that understanding.
Production Disasters and How to Fix (or Prevent) Them
Mike Rankin
Yeah, I know. Including this one is like voting for myself in an election (sorry, not sorry). The fact is, I’d be excited for this session regardless of who was doing it. Every designer knows what it’s like to be faced with a sudden crisis at the worst possible time. Crashing files, missing fonts, unusable artwork, printing problems, you name it, we’ve dealt with it all in some shape or form. So, I thought it would be helpful to go over some of these nightmare scenarios in the safe space of the conference room and share solutions to get you out of a jam quickly, along with best practices for avoiding the drama next time out.
Making Illustrator Artwork Look Organic
Monika Gause
Monika Gause is my Illustrator Hero. I’ve been using Illustrator since 1995. I’ve seen (and made) a lot of vector artwork, and I have never met anyone whose knowledge and creative imagination I admire more than Monika’s. Exhibit A: Check out her YouTube video on creating complex artwork with the Appearance panel and just a single anchor point! Who would even imagine such a thing was possible—and then go do it? Monika Gause, that’s who. That’s a wild example, but it shows how she thinks deeply about Illustrator’s features and explores them to their limits. Whether you just started using Illustrator, or you’ve been using it for decades, I think you’ll learn some amazingly useful things in this session.
Three Minutes Max: InDesign
David Blatner and Friends
Not gonna lie, this one’s personal. You see, each year we speakers save our best, top secret, mind-blowing tips and techniques for this session, where we have exactly three minutes to complete the demonstration. The competition is 100% friendly but very intense. At the end, the audience votes to determine the winner. At stake are the bragging rights for being the Three Minutes Max Champion until the next CreativePro Week. In recent years, Keith Gilbert (more about him below) has dominated, despite our best efforts to unseat him from the throne. This is always the rowdiest and funniest session of the show. I promise you will be both amused and amazed. And this year, Keith’s going down. Well, maybe. He’s damn good.
Photoshop: A Designer’s Approach
Nigel French
Recently, I had the honor of co-authoring a book on Photoshop with Nigel French. The experience was a bit like having an Olympic marathoner ask you to come jogging with them—it was a joy just to keep up. Nigel knows how to combine the most powerful Photoshop features to achieve any effect he wants. He also has impeccable taste. The result is design work that is purposeful, beautiful, and well-built. Most importantly: Nigel can demonstrate and explain the magic clearly so you can apply it in your own work. Don’t miss this.
Stop Their Scroll
Kladi Vergine
By now, I think we all recognize the importance of social media for building an audience, establishing a brand, and rising above the noise to get your message across. But you can’t do any of those things if people scroll right by your stuff. It might seem hopeless when you only have an instant to capture someone’s interest before they flick your best efforts off-screen and into oblivion. But Kladi has thrived in this challenging environment because she knows how to make content that perfectly (and instantly!) conveys the message that learning from her is fun. So, I’m excited to see her break down the process and show how to use the tools we already have to grab a viewer’s attention for that one critical moment that makes all the difference. I’m just hoping she doesn’t tell me I have to do a TikTok dance video. Not gonna happen.
PowerPoint for InDesign Users: Get Up to Speed Fast
Nolan Haims
PowerPoint gets a bad rap and I think I know why. It’s a combination of the software’s ubiquity, which turned the word PowerPoint into a synonym for presentation, along with the bad memories we all have of poorly designed slide decks presented in a mind-numbing manner. But those problems are the fault of the designer and the presenter, not the software. I had my PowerPoint awakening at last year’s CreativePro Week, when I watched presenters create stunning designs with far more speed and ease than it would take in the Adobe apps. This year, I’m planning to build on the good vibes with sessions like this one by Nolan, who makes it all look easy and doable, even for those of us without a ton of experience making PowerPoints, er, presentations.
Acrobat Features You Never Learned
(But Need to Know)
Keith Gilbert
We have a saying here at CreativePro: “No One Knows It All.” There are just too many programs, with too many features, and too many use cases. That’s why my contacts list is my most prized digital possession. I’ll gladly admit there’s tons of stuff I don’t know; but I always know someone else who does. And quite often that someone is Keith Gilbert (yeah, the same guy from Three Minutes Max above). He’s been doing this stuff for 35 years and the scope of his knowledge is ridiculous. Whether you need to edit a video or build an entire automated publishing system, Keith’s your man. And of course we all have to deal with PDFs. So, when Keith starts talking about some obscure feature of Adobe Acrobat he thinks I should be using, you can bet I’m gonna listen.
Hot Stuff
CreativePro Week 2023 is going to be a hot show, and not because the outside temperature in Phoenix will likely be over 100 degrees (I’m sure the conference rooms will be comfortably air conditioned). It’s an incredible opportunity to learn from the world’s top graphic design educators, mix and mingle with like-minded peers in a fun and friendly atmosphere, and take home new knowledge and connections that can boost your career in countless ways. I hope to see you Phoenix, June 5–9. Click here to learn more and sign up now!
This article was last modified on March 9, 2023
This article was first published on March 9, 2023
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