The Making of the CreativePro Week 2026 Agenda

Hi there, I’m David Blatner, President of CreativePro Network, and this is the CreativePro Podcast. This is where design professionals like you can come and learn about professional development and all kinds of cool stuff that will keep you on the cutting edge of design. That’s what we’re doing today.

And I have with me here, Teresa Jackson, who’s our programming manager and manages our podcast. So Teresa, welcome. It’s so fun to be here, having a conversation.

Welcome, David. I welcome, I invited you. Thank you for kicking us off.

You’re right, you’re right. I appreciate that so much. I’m just so used to, after 20 years of doing podcasts with Anne-Marie, I’m so used to just diving right in like that.

You’re right. You invited me to come on this podcast to talk about CreativePro Week specifically, because we just launched the CreativePro Week agenda. Can I let out a big sigh of relief? Yay, it’s done.

This has been major, a major task. And so we thought we’d jump in and talk about it. Talk about what, not just talk about what’s in the agenda, but talk about the making of the agenda.

How we went into the ground and we dug up the agenda. No, how we, how do you make an agenda? That’s what we’re gonna talk about. How do you make an agenda for CreativePro Week? A little- One bite at a time.

One- One puzzle piece. That’s what it was. It was- That’s- It was a puzzle.

It was definitely a puzzle. And a lot of people, you know, most people have no idea what goes into making an event like CreativePro Week. This is going to be our 10th anniversary of CreativePro Week, June 29th through July 3rd in Nashville and online.

If you can’t come to Nashville, it’ll be online. And so, yeah, we’ve been doing CreativePro Week for a long time and then a bunch of other events even before that. So we thought we, I guess we’re getting good at it.

I wanted to ask you about that, David, because, well, first of all, I’ve learned so much from the process of doing this because this was my first time programming an event like this. I’d been a speaker to a number of CreativePro Weeks. So I had an idea of what they were all about, but, you know, I show up and they’re awesome.

And I like, that was great, but I didn’t ever really consider how much work really went into putting the program together and planning it. But you’ve done lots and lots of these events. So what can you share about the early days to where we are now and where CreativePro Week has evolved from or out of or what that process has been like? Absolutely.

Before we do that, I am gonna mention that there’s a lot, CreativePro does a lot of other stuff, right? So just, if you’re new to CreativePro or this is the first time you’re listening to the podcast or watching the podcast, I do wanna point out that CreativePro Week is our annual event. It’s only one part of many things that CreativePro does. We’ve got a membership program, for example.

Membership is, you get access to CreativePro Magazine and lots of downloadable templates and all kinds of stuff, all kinds of resources to help you thrive in your career. So if you’re interested in CreativePro membership, we’re gonna have a link in the show notes or you could just go to creativepro.com, click on the little membership thing and learn more about that. And if you do wanna sign up to be a member, use the discount code podcast, it’s a podcast, so use podcast and you’ll get $15 off that membership.

So that is one thing. And so we do the membership and we do a bunch of other events as well. We’ll talk about those in a little bit.

And then we do CreativePro Week. And you’re right, I have been doing events and event programming a very, very long time. In the early 90s, I think it was 93, 92 or 93, we launched, I was in an office space with some other guys who had launched a PageMaker conference, if you can imagine that.

What? What’s that? Back, way back when the PageMaker, it’s called ThunderLizard Productions and ThunderLizard was launched in the same office space that we were all sharing at the time. And they said, okay, PageMaker, that’s pretty cool. Hey, David, you know a lot about this little program called QuarkXPress.

Like, yeah, yeah, I was a kid, but that was my happy place was QuarkXPress. And I had recently written a book about QuarkXPress. So they said, why don’t you do the programming for our QuarkXPress conference? So this was like, like I said, 92, 93.

And so I was like, I’ve never done that before. And I was kind of in the same boat that you’ve been in. Like, how do you program a multi-day, multi-track event with speakers from all over the world to talk about a product like that? And in some ways, I’m gonna tell you, it hasn’t changed.

The process hasn’t changed, except back then, I think I was actually like writing on index cards and Post-it notes and moving them around. So maybe it’s changed a little bit, but not that much. So I did QuarkXPress, we did the very first Photoshop conference ever in San Francisco.

I think that was 94. And then the years went by and all of a sudden, here we are, CreativePro, it’s like fast forward, to CreativePro doing events. And again, the process is ultimately the same because it all comes down to how do you find the best people who are the most passionate about topics that are really gonna help people thrive? Right, it’s not- It’s about the audience, right? It’s about the audience.

I’m looking for speakers who want to connect and help the audience not to show off whatever it is they know. Oh my gosh, that is like one of the most important things. And a lot of people don’t realize that because they’re used to going to events.

There’s a lot of events out there, I don’t need to name names. There’s a lot of events out there that are all about the speakers showing up and showing off. Look at my beautiful art.

Look at this cool thing that I did. Look how cool I, and I’m like, we don’t need that. Nobody needs that.

What people need is how do you do it, how to. And so CreativePro is always about how to do the thing yourself. So if I’m on stage, you’re right, it’s not about me.

Excuse me, it’s about how to help you do cool stuff. Have a drink of that boba. Yeah.

100%. I try to meet with, well, we have a lot of speakers at CreativePro Week that have been year after year. So we know who they are and we’re excited.

They’re our friends and we wanna see them there. And then we have, every year we wanna bring in new speakers. So I always meet, for everybody that’s new, I met with them online and spend some time talking with them because I wanted to get a feel for what gets them excited.

And if they get themselves excited, they’re not the right person, right? If they’re excited about what they have to give and share, then they’re the right person. Exactly. When people are excited about something, we always wanna know what are you passionate about teaching? Not just about for yourself, but what do you love teaching? If you were to sit down at a table with a friend who was into what you’re doing, what do you mostly wanna show them? Check out this amazing thing.

That’s what we want people on stage talking about. And so I love that you’re having these conversations and you’re really getting to know the presenters in that intimate way, in that direct way to understand what do they care about. That’s so important to what we’re doing.

I have such the benefit of technology. In the nineties, you weren’t able to just jump on a Zoom call and meet somebody and feel like you’re in the same room with them, right? How’d you do that? There are a lot of phone calls. CompuServe, remember CompuServe? We would write a lot of emails pre-internet.

Yeah, it was a different time for sure. I just wanna say, so a lot of people don’t realize that CreativePro Week developed out of some other events that we did. I mentioned that we did other events, but we were doing several events 10 plus years ago called like the InDesign Conference and PepCon.

PepCon was our big one. PepCon was the Print Me Publishing Conference and also the PSAI, which was all about Photoshop and Illustrator. And in 2016-ish, we said, 2017, I guess was the first year, we said, let’s gather all of those events up and make it into one thing, CreativePro Week.

We’re gonna cover InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and also let’s get into some other stuff as well. Other design, Acrobat. I don’t think we had, we hadn’t started PowerPoint yet at that point.

We are doing that now. But- That was called Click. That was in Click.

That was 2018, actually, we started Click, which was all about presentation design. And so we rolled all of that into CreativePro Week. And it was, it became in some ways a bigger challenge.

So it’s harder to talk about because you have to make decisions, right? We can only have so many InDesign sessions, so many Photoshop sessions and so on, all within a single week. But just one quick thing I wanted to say about the earlier days, that PepCon, because PepCon, if you’ll forgive me the nostalgia, PepCon, Anne-Marie Concepcion and I started PepCon with the help of Marcy Eversall, who’s still our events director, back in 2010. And we had a very clear vision for what we wanted.

What we wanted for PepCon was to bring all of our friends together to talk about cool stuff and not lose money. That’s really what it came down to. It hasn’t changed, has it? It’s still about bringing our friends together to talk about cool stuff.

Except now the friends are not just the other speakers, they’re hundreds of audience members from all over the world. There’s new friends, all the new people we bring in every year to talk about new topics. It’s always new, but it’s still all about bringing a group of friends together to talk about cool stuff.

Did you have any arguments about content? Because you and Anne-Marie, were you programming it together? And did you think, oh, but we need to have this content. And did Anne-Marie sometimes not be in alignment with that? Or did you work pretty well together on that? We worked really well together. Honestly, it’s very similar to the way that you and I worked together on Creator Pro Week this year.

I mean, you were building the structure of this thing. You were doing the heavy lifting. I’m gonna give you all the kudos for doing the heavy lifting of getting this thing put together.

But still, you and I would jump on a call and we’d say, so what about this? And what about that? And then we would just discuss it. It becomes this ongoing discussion. How many InDesign sessions do we want? How many Photoshop? Oh wait, what about this session, which is about Photoshop and InDesign working together? Does that count? I love the way that you built the system of these tables, of how many of each different sessions have we done in the past? And how many do we wanna do this year? There’s a real structure to it that a lot of people don’t realize that we need to find a balance.

Yeah. So the first question that I asked myself was, how many categories do we have that cover all the different type of content? Because CreativePro Week’s very broad in the content. And we wanted to expand into some new categories based on the focus group sessions that we had last year and the feedback that we got from attendees.

So I made like a spreadsheet of how many Photoshop sessions we had, how many Illustrator, how many InDesign, how many PowerPoint, how many workflow in general sessions, how many just were in another category that didn’t fit in any of those, how many were really more about inspiration than how to, because that’s important in a big event like this as well. And you know what I found, David? InDesign was dominating. I wonder why.

It was dominating and I came to you and I’m like, do we really need twice as many InDesign sessions as Photoshop and Illustrator? And your answer was yes. Of course. And I pushed back a little bit.

You did push back and with good arguments. And I think we found a better balance. Yeah.

Definitely a better balance. That said, because we were able to sneak InDesign in to these other multi cross app sessions, I think I was able to feel comfortable. I love it.

You know, I love InDesign. InDesign is my happy place. I always wanna talk more about InDesign and all the cool things you can do with it.

But you’re right. CreativePro Week is about building the system, all the different things that design professionals need to be successful. And InDesign is a key part of that, but it’s not the only part.

Right. The true reality in a day-to-day workflow is most designers aren’t using a single tool ever. Right.

Right. All those different parts matter. So yeah, I feel really good about the balance that we created.

I kept saying, I really want a diversity of content and presenters. You know, the style of their presentation, the kind of work that they do, what they focus on, just try and be as broad as possible. And you know what I discovered right away is we didn’t have enough.

There wasn’t enough slots for everything that I hoped to get on the agenda. And that has been true for 30 something years. Every single event, there’s more to talk about than we can possibly do at an event.

And that is the deep frustration because I always wanna give more, always wanna do more of these sessions. Now we should probably point out that, like where do these sessions come from? Because some of them you would just thought up or I thought up, but most of them were suggested by someone, right? Because we put out a call for presenters, a call for speakers. That by the way is open year round.

If you’re listening to this and you’re like, wow, I really wanna speak at this event. What do I do? The first thing you should do is just submit your idea using a form. We have a form on creativepro.com and we’ll put a link in the show notes for you to get to it.

And you just fill it in. Here’s my background. Here’s what I do.

Here’s what I am passionate about. Here’s what I love teaching, what I love sharing. And then Teresa, you started going through all of those, right? Long list goes into an air table.

We have an air table database of all that stuff. And it’s great to have that database. I get emails too.

And if you’re listening and you’re a wannabe speaker, the database, it’s not gonna get lost if you send it to me in an email. Yes. I know this is- People have been doing that for years.

I emailed you. Why didn’t I hear back? I’m like, have you seen my inbox? Yeah. Yeah.

Just fill out the form. It won’t get lost there. But air table is awesome because I can tag things and organize it.

And I have sessions that we have run in the past that were really good and really successful. And we’d probably wanna revisit them at some point. So those are held onto in a category so that I could, when I’m looking for ideas and trying to fill holes in events, I can look at those past sessions we did.

We can elaborate or build off of those sessions. So yeah, the database for that content is the best. It is so helpful.

We will put that link in the show notes. And then the next thing I’ll do is I like to meet with potential speakers. I like to have conversations with them and find out, what are you passionate about? What is it? What is it that gets you excited? So a lot of the sessions in CreativePro Week came from those submissions, but maybe not, honestly, maybe not even 50% because you and I did a lot of brainstorming on what do we, we thought about the focus groups and the feedback that we got and the goals that we set, that CreativePro set for this year for growth, the content areas we wanna grow into.

And then I went out looking for speakers for that content as well. So it’s a little everything, trying to put it together. But even when you and I are coming up with some other topic, often we’ll still go back to that database and say, who could do this? Who is the right person for this? And we’ll say, oh, wait a minute, so-and-so said this, this session is kind of adjacent.

Could they move over here? And then you’ll have a conversation with them and they’ll say, oh yeah, okay, yeah, let’s shift over there. Having that conversation, that discussion, that almost compromise is really key to getting just the right sessions. One of the most important things, I guess I should say, one of the most important pieces of information that people don’t realize about putting on a show, especially a CreativePro show, is because we’re so how-to focused, we’re really aiming to find things that are gonna help people thrive in their work.

Most of our attendees are coming from small to extremely large companies. Most of these people are there because they’re trying to get their work done more efficiently, be more productive. So oftentimes people will pitch a session that they are passionate about, that they care a lot about, but frankly, it’s about fine art or something which- Lightroom.

Lightroom, actually Lightroom, that’s an interesting site. I was gonna say more like Fresco. Fresco, you know, which is cool, amazing, but it’s not gonna help people get their work done, our people get their work done, our audience get their work done.

You and I don’t always agree on this topic. And it’s fun to banter about it because first of all, I’ll say, being on the other side of this, I have so much more appreciation and understanding of programming content that the audience needs, knowing who our attendees are and knowing what they need to do their job better. That is really the first question.

When we’re looking at the session by session, we’re asking ourself this question, is this the content that our attendees need in their day-to-day work? And I don’t honestly, for sure, know that I always know the answer to that, right? Because everybody has different workflows and they’re using different tools and they’re doing just different kinds of creative work, but there’s a core set of content that applies to everybody. And then there’s the stuff on the fringes, like I say, I mean, I don’t even like to think of Lightroom as on the fringe, but you and I have this conversation that, well, this isn’t a photography event. Our attendees aren’t photographers, right? They’re art directors and designers.

Well, a lot of them are photographers, but that’s not what they do for their job. That’s not how they’re paid. You know, a lot of them, for example, we do photo walks at the event.

We do all kinds of stuff. People love taking pictures and they want them to be excellent, but that’s not how they’re making their job, how they’re making their money, yeah. But they probably, not even probably, they are working with images in their work, their day-to-day work.

So whether they capture that image, sometimes they are, they’re capturing their own images for their creative work. So I do think that knowing how to make an image look good is important for every creative, whether you’re doing video or publications or whatever. Yep.

No, Lightroom, that’s why I laughed about Lightroom because you and I have had so many conversations about this. Lightroom is one of those apps where a lot more pro designers, graphic designers should know this app, should have it on their machine. There’s all kinds of things you can do with it as a designer, not as a photographer.

That’s one which, honestly, it’s just hard to get people to get excited about. It’s hard to get the designers to come to that session. We’ve done them for years.

We’ve done a lot of Lightroom sessions and there’s just not enough people who get excited about them. And that’s what I’ve really learned from this is that we may know that this is content that’s important. We may feel really strongly about it, but if the attendees aren’t asking for it and we have a limited number of slots in the agenda, it’s kind of difficult to fill it with something that they don’t want.

So hard, so hard. Absolutely. And then sometimes we just go out on a branch, a leap.

We stretch. We stretch into new areas, new ideas, because we have no idea what is gonna catch on. And some of those are real surprises.

It’s exciting. We’re doing that this year. We are doing that this year.

I’m excited, a little bit nervous, because anytime you try something new, you don’t know. Yeah, what’s an example of something we’re doing this year? We’re doing a whole track for attendees in person. So since 2020, CreativePro Week went online during 2020 and 2021.

And then when we came back in person, it became hybrid. So we had virtual audience and an in-person audience. And until 2026, every session was simulcast, shall we say, like in person and online, right? So this year we have a track that’s dedicated for the attendees that are there in person.

And so my challenge in programming that content was to bring content to CreativePro Week that maybe wouldn’t resonate as well in a screen where you’re watching it on screen, where being in person creates a different environment for the learners. And so that became more challenging to program than I expected it to be. But it’s exciting because it’s an opportunity to teach in a different way, a little bit different way, more hands-on, more engagement with the audience.

We should probably say why we did that fourth track, why we took the fourth track and made it in-person only, which there’s lots of reasons. But one of them, you have to understand, it’s actually very hard to do a hybrid of a session, which is hybrid, where people online feel like they’re there. And we have been trying all kinds of things to make people who are watching the events online feel like they’re there, feel like they’re part of this event.

For example, we hire moderators to sit in the front row of each session, all the sessions that we’re live streaming. We have moderators there who are the representative of the people online. And so if people are asking questions online or they need help, that moderator, we’re paying this person to be there, to be the representative of all the people online, to be that intermediary.

But it’s still, even with that, it’s really hard to pull off some kinds of sessions that can only be done when you’re in the same room. So a great example is we’ve been asked for quite a while to do things like portfolio review. Show me, bring your artwork and let’s talk about it.

That’s basically impossible to do online or it’d be really, really hard to do online. But you’re gonna be doing that with Nigel, right? Yeah, Nigel and I met this morning to talk about how we want that to run and what it’s gonna look like. And I’m so excited.

We have lots of ideas, lots to still figure out, but there’s time, we’ll get it figured out. So if you’re out there and you’re coming to CreativePro Week, think about getting your portfolio together for that session. Because only the people that are there in person will be able to participate in that.

We’ve got some other ones in that fourth track. Nolan Haims is gonna be doing a thing which I cannot wait for this. Basically taking paper, things that you could do with your own hands, taking paper products and turning them into, magically turning them into things that you could use not just for fun, but could actually work, do for your company.

I don’t know, it’s an interesting idea. So we’ll see how that plays out. There’s some, Kara Plitonich is gonna be doing a couple of sessions that are more craft-based, right? Both of our sessions, yeah.

One is a Photoshop hand lettering session, and the other one is more of the crafts. She’s done these sessions in the past where she has shared her crafts just in a slideshow, but now she’s gonna actually get to bring it into the room because it’ll be in person. So super excited by that.

We’re doing a podcast there as well. Really excited by that. So that’s gonna be fun to be able to do.

So there’s all kinds of reasons and different sorts of things that we can do when it’s in person like that. But you’re right, it was a real challenge to figure out how do we thread that needle. We’re doing some hands-on AI training in that track four.

I’m really curious to see how that plays out as well. A lot of the AI, obviously designers need to be doing more AI. We need to be more comfortable with that technology.

And yet some of it, it’s not just about typing in a prompt. It can be very involved. And so Amy Balliett is gonna be walking us through a two-part session on building agents.

Agents that can actually do work for us. That’s gonna be fascinating. Absolute fascinating.

What are some other sessions? Maybe sessions that you’re looking forward to that are gonna be both in-person and online? The very first session to open the event. I can’t wait. Why, why? Tell us about it.

Chris Converse. Well, first of all, Chris is just awesome. Everything he does is amazing.

He is like the unicorn, right? He can teach everything. And his session is gonna be a little bit of everything. And it’s gonna be, it’s gonna have entertainment value on top of that.

We’re calling it CC Mixtape. I don’t know that I really wanna elaborate too much more on that because I don’t wanna give away the fun. But it’s gonna be awesome.

I am very excited for that. It is totally gonna be awesome. There are so many other sessions that I’m excited about.

Nick De Cuevas is gonna come back and talk about brand consistency. Such an important topic. It’s a big topic.

It’s not just one specific app, but how you can ensure brand consistency. I have a list up here. By the way, this list I’m looking at, this actually might be interesting for people.

I mentioned in the old days we’d use Post-its and index cards. Then for a long time, I was doing stuff like with Google Docs or Google Sheets. I’d make a very complicated sheet.

We did Excel, then we moved to Google Sheets. When we started this process to try and fit together five days of four tracks, you said, you had the suggestion of doing it a different way, using a different technology. Tell us about that.

Well, you shared your, it was like Excel, but I think it was a Google Sheet. So it was a spreadsheet. Yeah.

And I just like went, no. No, this is not going to work. I had to come up with another solution.

So I started thinking about, first, I’m very visual. Like I can work in a spreadsheet, but I always have to try and make it look pretty before I can do anything. And I just struggle with that, with everything.

And it’s pretty hard to make a spreadsheet look pretty and it’s painful. So I was like, nope, that’s not going to work. So in the past, I had used a mirror board for a couple of things.

And I thought, mirror is like a digital whiteboard and you can put shapes on it. You could put text fields. And I wasn’t even really sure what all was possible, but I figured it would be better than a spreadsheet.

So I started building the weeks. I had like a grid that I built out for each week with all the tracks and the times. And then I just made little chips, like a Post-it, right? Like I made chips, like they were a Post-it note and I put a session title on it.

And I stacked all those up on the side under the categories and I color coded them, of course, because I had to make it look pretty. So each of the category was color coded. And then it just became a puzzle, just dragging a session into a slot and then moving it to another one.

And then looking at what sessions were in the same, you know, time slot each day and whether those made the most sense and trying to get the balance. Also thinking about three minute max, because we want to make sure that the speakers that are there for Photoshop three minute max are the ones who are our Photoshop experts. We want to make sure that’s the same day.

It really was a puzzle, like a very complicated puzzle with all these pieces getting moved around. But Miro made it fun and easy, not easy, but, you know, doable. No, it was a brilliant move.

And the ability to color code like you did, the ability to just move these little swatches around as representatives of the sessions, it’s exactly what I always wanted to do in the past, but I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have any tools, or I didn’t know the tools to do it. So that’s why I was stuck in a spreadsheet, but this is way, way better to be able to, oh, no, I don’t like that one.

Let’s move that over here. Let’s swap this over there. It was awesome.

Yeah. I forgot to mention it’s collaborative. So I shared the board with you and we could be in there working at the same time, dragging stuff over.

Yeah, what about this? What about that? Let’s put this over here. Yes, it’s incredible. The ability to work collaboratively like that is huge, is huge.

And in fact, that is one of the themes that we’re bringing into CreativePro Week as well, because we know that you’re working collaboratively as well. Everyone, whether it’s Photoshop and Design Illustrator and so on, you’re part of a team typically. Even if you’re working outside of the team, you have to contribute to that workflow.

So that is a key part of what we’re doing at CreativePro Week as well. Not just how do you get your work done efficiently, productively, and as high quality, but how do you fit into the much larger picture? Right. That’s key, that’s key.

You mentioned Three Minutes Max. I just wanna push on that because I realized some people listening or watching may not know about Three Minutes Max. It’s my favorite part of the entire conference.

I mean, it’s great. Can you explain how that works? Sure. I wanna say that I think Three Minute Max is our favorite because we’re learning and we’re being entertained.

It’s both. It’s a great mix of both, right? Yep. So it’s part competition and part tips.

Each speaker that presents gets three minutes. Exactly, we have a timer running. And before they give their tip, before the timer starts, we draw a name from attendees.

So they’re playing for the name that they drew. So if they end up being the winner, then the name they drew, the attendee, is the winner. And we give a gift away for that.

So we do Three Minute Max for Photoshop on the first night and then Illustrator and then InDesign on Wednesday. And this year we’re gonna do an AI Three Minute Max. So let’s hope that we don’t crash the internet with that one, right? I don’t even know that we would have tried that a few years ago because there was always a bandwidth question.

But it seems like it’s getting, that hasn’t been an issue in recent years. So I think it’s gonna cross my fingers. Do you know, actually a lot of people listening may not realize we actually hire a dedicated internet bandwidth guy to come out and manage our show.

So we are constantly tracking. He’s like sitting in a little room in the back. I didn’t know that.

Oh, you didn’t know that? So Ernie or his team, we’ve had a couple of other people, they are, they manage the internet. My throat’s really going out today. They manage the internet for the entire show.

And so it’s important for all kinds of reasons. So, but this is a type of session where we’re gonna say, hey Ernie, we’re gonna need some bandwidth for that session in there. Make sure we have it.

And he makes it work. It’s great. So we have like 10, maybe 10 presenters come up and they each get three minutes and there is some definite like ribbing going on between the speakers, like, you know, poking fun or teasing each other.

It’s good natured. It’s so much fun. And then we choose the winner by applause, which is, you know, it’s a little subjective, but no, in the past you’ve had some kind of a, like.

We have, we’ve done, we’ve tried to, we’ve tried a number of things, the applause meter or this, that. Last year, actually, we did the, we did a online voting. So you just vote on the app.

That’s the most accurate. Yeah. So you, but it’s taking votes from the online audience as well as the in-person attendees, right? That’s right.

That’s a, again, we’re constantly trying to figure out how to get the online people as part of the experience. So, so now with the online app, we’re able to do that. So for a number of years running, Jesus Ramirez won the Photoshop three minute max, right? He had massive bragging rights.

It was really irritating the rest of us. Like he wins every year. Is it because he’s good looking? Like what is it? It’s true.

True. This year, so last year, Jesus was not there. He wasn’t able to make it last year.

This year, I’m betting on Jesus. And I’ll tell you why. Jesus, I know we’re off topic here, but Jesus also has a new baby.

And so I feel like not only is he going to have the best tip, but I swear there’s, he is going to have a picture of that baby in there and everyone’s just going to fall for it. It’s, it’s a, you can’t fight. You can’t fight Jesus.

I don’t know. No, I know. Kara won last year.

So she’s the reigning champion. She’s great. So Kara and I were figuring out who’s going to host.

And I reached out to Kara and I said, all right, I’m going to host one and you’re going to host the other. And David’s going to host in design. So do you want Photoshop or do you want Illustrator? And she said, I can’t host Photoshop.

I’m the reigning champion. I got to come back and keep my title. So she’s going to show up ready to deliver.

That is so funny. Okay. All right.

If anyone can beat Jesus, it’ll, it’ll be Kara for sure. I think so. I want to talk a little bit about some other, going back to the agenda topics.

I know we need to wrap this up, but I want to talk a little bit about some of the areas that we’re pushing out into some new things because I’m weirdly excited about them. Things that we have never really been able to do before. One of them, you were talking about how you kept talking to people at the event and the focus groups and so on about enterprise stuff.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. We hear, and this is going back a few years now, we hear from attendees, they’re frustrated because some of the content that gets taught, they don’t have access to. And sometimes I don’t even know why they don’t have access.

They might not have creative cloud libraries. Why don’t they have creative cloud libraries? AI is becoming a really big issue because some of, in some enterprise accounts, those tools are locked down. So we are bringing an expert, Kevin Stollmeyer is an expert in enterprise accounts, and he’s going to lay it all out.

This is why you may or may not have these tools and even better, what do you need to say to your IT department in a nice, pretty pleased way to get those tools turned on so that you have access to them? Great. That’s going to be so valuable. The kind of thing you cannot get anywhere, right? You can’t get access to that kind of expert to who really understands, how do you talk to your IT department? I love that.

Another area that I’m really excited about, you mentioned stretching out into new areas as well, is Microsoft Word, which is honestly weird that I would be excited about anything involving Microsoft Word. But here’s the thing, we live in, even in a Adobe environment, we still live in a Microsoft world. There is still this environment out there and designers, it’s, I cannot believe that we’re still in the 21st century, still saying I have to make stuff look good in Microsoft products like Word.

I’ve designed all this stuff in InDesign maybe, or Illustrator or Photoshop, but it needs to look good in Word. And so I’m really excited that we’re going to be talking about that a little bit. Yeah, we have two sessions.

One’s going to focus on the typography. If you haven’t spent a lot of time in Word, if you’re an InDesign user and you haven’t spent a lot of time in Word and you curse Word as soon as you open it, it comes from this, they’re basically structured completely different. Microsoft Word is already a container for your text before you do anything.

There’s already a container there for your text, but InDesign, you have to create a container to put the text in. So that’s where it starts. And then it goes from there and it gets more complicated if you haven’t ever used it.

So we’re going to do one session on that, and then the next session is going to be on creating these layouts. How can you make a really beautiful layout in Word? It is possible. It is possible.

So we’re going to learn how to do that. I’m super excited that we have two sessions on that. And because we’ve been hearing from our attendees, I have to use Word.

Right, right. So we’ll be doing plenty with InDesign and Photoshop, PowerPoint, but we have to get into these niche topics as well. Because again, our goal with all of these sessions, our goal is to help you thrive by design in your work.

Someone, you’re going to need this sooner or later. It’s good to have some- In your work, it’s not tool specific. What are, you’re doing work in all these different areas.

We’re trying to help. Yeah. So Jennifer Parkinson’s going to be doing that.

Mike Parkinson, Jennifer’s husband, is going to be talking about PowerPoint. And that’s the other big part of the Microsoft equation. Although he’s also going to be talking about how PowerPoint fits into the Adobe environment as well.

Right? That’s going to be part of his, right? So how do you get all these things to fit together is, it’s critical if you’re going to be efficient with these tools. We’re also bringing some more video content. That was another area that we really want to expand into.

And it, video and animation, it kind of fits in that Lightroom bucket of, we know it’s important. Are our attendees going to show up when we bring this content to them? Because we’ve done some video in the past, and those, there’s been some empty seats in those rooms compared to some of the other ones. And my feeling is we need to offer more of it, and then more people will come looking for it.

So we’re offering some more video and animation this year. Here’s the thing about, I think it’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be really cool to see that stuff.

Here’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize about Creator Pro Week, and it’s critical. You can’t do it all. You can’t see all these sessions while you’re at the conference.

But you can see all the sessions because you get access to all the videos for all the sessions on those days. Now, there is a caveat this year that a lot of those sessions in that fourth track, the ones you have to be there in person, some of those are not gonna be recorded. It’s just the way it is.

You gotta be there in person. But most of the sessions, you’re gonna have access to go to, go to, watch the videos for a full year. And that’s huge, huge value that a lot of people don’t realize.

They show up at the event, they leave, and we have to say, no, come back, watch those videos. You can be learning all year long by watching those videos. If you just took one of those, one video a week, you could spend the entire week watching those things.

It’s such a good reminder, David, because I’m sure there’s listeners out there right now who were at Creator Pro Week in 2025 that forgot that all that great content that they were gonna watch, there’s still time. It’s still there. There is, yeah.

Go watch that stuff. Learn.creativepro.com, right? Yeah, learn.creativepro.com. That’s where you find all those recordings. So they’re sitting there waiting for you to sign in and watch them.

What other stuff should we? Oh, there is, you know, we’re talking a lot about the sessions and that grid and building up, but there’s other stuff too. I mentioned the photo walk that we do. There’s a lot of other stuff outside the grid that is important.

The networking reception, the evening events. We have stuff like the Camp CreativePro, which is a maker space, basically an art space that we do the maker mornings, right? And have people come in. So there’s a lot of other stuff happening around the edges of CreativePro Week sessions.

I think the first and most important part of that is we’re a community and it’s a community space. The entire week is a space for community and CreativePro Week is different than a lot of conferences you may go to where the speakers are part of the community and we’re in the same lunchroom and we are mingling with the community during the event and in the evenings. And so we start the morning with a maker morning, which is something we haven’t programmed that out yet.

We’re not exactly sure what we’re gonna do, but we will have crafts every morning, something hands-on. Maybe craft isn’t the right thing. We had a proposal to do calligraphy.

So that’s a possible maker morning session that we’ll do. And if you have ideas, if you’re out there listening and you’re like, I want this maker morning, please send it to us. Let us know.

Yeah. Let us know. I love that.

Those were so popular last year. We had to bring extra chairs in. We just were blown away by the interest.

And then in the evening, well, actually in the early mornings in 2025, we did photo walks and those were really popular too. We’re thinking about doing a night photo walk. I think it’d be cool.

Nashville, Nashville at night. It’s gonna be awesome. We gotta be out there at nighttime for sure.

I wanna go back to what you were saying quickly about the community, that it’s a community being there. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about how the goal is to get all of our friends together. And there are friends who we’ve been known, they’ve been coming to events for years and some of them are speakers and some of them are attendees.

And then there are the friends that we haven’t made yet. All the friends are the people who we don’t know you yet, but when you show up, you sit at the lunch table with us or the breakfast table, you meet us in the hallways, we start chatting. So you’re all friends at CreativePro Week.

It really is that kind of community. It’s the best community. And we hear that from all the attendees every year.

Like I found where I belong. It’s the best time of year. I’m so excited for it.

And it’s so wonderful having you put this agenda together. I mean, yes, I was involved in helping out, but I really mean it. You just structured this so well this year with the new speakers.

We have a lot of new speakers coming in. We have 10 new speakers. And some of them are past attendees.

Yeah, like Jose, Jose Acevedo, who’s gonna be coming and talking about Gradient Mesh. Wow, that’s gonna be mind-blowing. He does this photo realistic illustrator mesh.

I think it’s incredible. Michael Mondragon was an attendee last year. Yeah.

And he’ll be speaking. Melissa Picon has not spoken at CreativePro Week before. Amanda Dalton.

But she’s attended a number of events and she’s spoken at online events. Amanda Dalton is also gonna be there for the first time. Amanda is so much fun.

I’m so excited that she’s gonna be there. And Guillermo, right? Guillermo did the Photoshop splash screen at 2Con last year. I think it was the 2025 version.

Oh, he’s amazing. I can’t wait to hear him speak. Yep, yep.

And so he’s gonna do a couple of sessions, including a hands-on, talking about collage. Collage, yeah. It’s gonna be some good stuff.

And then lots of our friends who’ve been speaking for years, Rob DeWinter and Bart Vanderville is gonna be there. Lori Ruhlin. Michael Flahert was there last year.

He’s coming back. Can’t wait. He is pretty amazing.

And hey, this is coming back after a year off. And same with Nikta and Laura Coyle. Laura wasn’t there last year.

So happy they were able to come back after a year absence. Joel Simmons and Kyle Hamrick. I mean, I’m looking at this list going, I can’t wait to hang out again.

I know. So it’s gonna be fun. Anything else that we should talk about with the agenda? I’m all excited now.

I was excited. What took you so long? It has been a great process. You know, it takes a long time to pull this together.

A lot of people don’t realize we start this process of working on the agenda like nine or 10 months before the show. We didn’t start early enough. That was my takeaway.

I told you that last week, right? I’m gonna start 2027 by September of this year. I think we should just jump in and start working on 2028 now. I, let’s just, let’s get it done.

It’s funny because, you know, because it’s a podcast, someone is gonna be listening to this or watching this in 2028 going, but… You’re right. So for the record, we’re recording this at the beginning of 2026. So if you’re watching it, you’re late, man.

We should talk about all the other events too, David, because one of the reminders that you gave me when I was like, there’s too many, I can’t fit them all in, David. I don’t know what to do. And you said, that’s why we have the other events throughout the year.

The deep dives. We do these deep dives. And it’s such a good, such a good point.

So for example, coming up, we’ve got the Design and AI Summit. So you mentioned we’re doing some AI at CreativePro Week, but we’re going deep. Two days in the spring, two days in the fall, deep dive into design and AI.

We’ve got the Design and Accessibility event. We’re doing some wonderful accessibility things. We didn’t even talk about having Dax Castro and Chad Chellius talk about accessibility at CreativePro Week, but we’re doing four day deep dive in the fall just on accessibility.

So you’re right. We can go far deeper. The InDesign Conference, we’ve brought that back online now.

Design and Marketing. Design and Marketing. So we have a lot of opportunities to go deep into those other events.

And all of those are still available. Check it out at creativepro.com slash events and you can get access. I think we have a discount code.

Don’t we have a discount code? Yeah, it’s saying podcast. Podcast. $100 off.

$100 off any of those events or CreativePro Week for that matter, right? If you use podcast when you’re registering. So do that for sure. Get that a hundred bucks off.

Love that. There’s a lot of good stuff coming on. A lot of good stuff coming.

So much. It’s so much fun. And there’s always something else to learn.

Oh my gosh. Every event, I learn new stuff. Like I said, I’ve been doing this for a little while and there’s always more to learn.

Yeah, that’s really important to recognize that we sit in the seat as the experts delivering this content, but we are learners too. We don’t know it all and we never will. And every time that we go to an attend or attended event or a session, we learn something every single month.

I learn something. Every single one. It’s so true.

And then sometimes I relearn because I’d already forgotten from the last time I learned it. Totally true. It is.

And that’s, what’s exciting about it, right? It’s exciting because when you’re when you’re in that environment of learning and of being around other people, it just lifts all the boats. And that’s the goal, right? No one of us, no one of us can understand all this. We can’t learn all everything we need to know, but what we can do is connect with a community of other people who do know these things.

So when we need it, we’ll go find that person. Or when we need it, we’ll have a community where we can all work together to thrive. That’s what CreativePro Week is.

That made me think of the membership that you talked about early on. Our membership has a forum and it’s very active with people asking some pretty esoteric questions about things. And then you almost always have an answer for them, David.

Wow. Sometimes, sometimes. If it’s InDesign, when it’s InDesign.

Okay, this has been great. Teresa, thank you for all of this. No, thank you, I invited you.

Thank me, I thank you. We’ll thank each other. Always, I always enjoy conversations with you.

This was great. This is fun. And I hope people watching, listening will, I hope that’s interesting to get a sense of how the sausage is made, how it’s all put together.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the show notes, either creativepro.com slash podcast. You can go right into the podcast and leave a note there or email us or just let us know. So one way or another, let us know, what do you think? What kinds of things do you wanna know more about? Yeah, what more like behind the scenes or process or what we’re thinking about or what we’re working towards.

Yeah, let us know. We’d love to talk about it. Excellent.

This has been a pleasure. All right. Take care, everybody.

Thank you.