Bring your coffee/tea/drink of choice and join us for an informal chat before the sessions begin.

How do you know if your typographic design system includes all the ingredients required to satisfy and delight readers? It turns out that the architecture of an ice cream sundae is a tasty template for building typographic design systems. Every dish needs a delicious base, a glorious sauce, and crunchy bits to pull it all together. This talk by industry luminary Ellen Lupton explores the essential layers of a beautiful typographic hierarchy and dives deep into how to craft the InDesign details that make it sparkle. Study examples of outstanding international design work and learn how to concoct better systems in your own typographic kitchen.

As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out! Learn power-user techniques for cleaning up your text to ensure quality, consistency, and professionalism. We’ll show you essential scripts, Find/Change hacks, and tricks for setting up your text so that you’ll be able to format it quickly and easily. Subjects include what to do in Word before importing, best practices for importing your text, and a critical 3-step process to strip out incorrect formatting (but leave the correct styles alone)!

These days, audiences need your type to pop off the page more than ever—and just adding a drop shadow or a bevel and emboss isn’t going to do it. Take it to the next level with type superstar Nigel French, as he examines some of the most fun, eye-catching, and practically brilliant methods for making fantastic type effects.

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our "virtual table" along with our speakers and experts in the presentation design community from around the world.

Professional typesetters have known for decades that to create beautiful type, you should focus on the spaces around each character! Join internationally renowned designer Charles Nix as he uncovers the secrets of the type masters. Topics include: optimal settings for hyphenation and justification; managing your margins; kerning and tracking tricks; and hidden or obscure settings that can make the difference between OK and OMG.

If you had a big, deluxe Swiss Army Knife, would you want to use just one blade? No, you’d want to try them all! Well, InDesign has dozens of type features, but most users take advantage of only a few. Learn what you’re missing and see how much more you could achieve if you started using features such as font menu filters, Column Rules, Auto-Size, Shading and Border, Paragraph Rules, Change Case, Keep Options, Underline and Strikethrough options, and more.

Everyone knows that you should use text styles in InDesign… but don’t stop with just setting up a few paragraph styles! InDesign has a wide variety of style features that will help you layout pages faster and more consistently than ever before. In this fast-paced styles deep-dive, we’ll explore character styles, nested styles, GREP styles, line styles, next style, and some crazy (but powerful) tips for mastering them! Learn how to do styles right in InDesign.

Bring your coffee/tea/drink of choice and join us for an informal chat before the sessions begin.

Designing accessible typography is a lot more complex than just choosing an accessible typeface. People with low vision, cognitive, language, and learning disabilities all have different visual needs when it comes to accessing your copy. In this talk, we will dig into some of the basic design considerations - such as font size, color contrast, column width, paragraph spacing, and kerning - to help make your typography more inclusive and reach even more readers.

Laying out a page means getting your text to flow precisely where you need it — which is not always an easy task! We’ll explore the fine points of margins, text wrap, split/span text, column balancing, and more in this session. The better you can control your text flow, the more effective your design will be.

Great design is not thrown together, it’s planned. And one of the most important planning tools is the grid. (No, not from the movie Tron… that’s a different grid.) Join us for an in-depth look at how to create scaffolding for your design through the power of guides, grids, baseline grids, leading, space before/after, and other critical tools.

Grab a bite to eat and come chat at our "virtual table" along with our speakers and experts in the presentation design community from around the world.

How do you type the Euro currency symbol on a US keyboard? What’s the difference between a figure space and a thin space (and when the heck would you use them)? Where can you find amazing bullet symbols? How do you make fractions look awesome? All these questions and more, answered in this indispensable session. Also includes free scripts you’d be crazy not to download.

It’s common knowledge that InDesign’s tabs and tables features can cause headaches. But with a few cool insights and a couple of hot tips, you’ll be happy, and setting tabular data faster and easier than ever. Topics include: clever margin and tab alignment tricks, making tab leaders look awesome, table footnotes, how to sort tables fast, building “continued” headings for multi-page tables, and more.

Are you still setting type with the same fonts and in the same way you did a decade ago? Shake off your rust and get up to speed with what’s new in typography! Let’s talk variable fonts, SVG fonts, OpenType tricks, type trends, and what the future will bring in this fun, interactive conversation between two type mavens.