View the poster of this year's special program for industry design professionals, designed by Faceout Studio.
Our program will also include the 10th anniversary celebration of the Top Shelf Book Cover Award program, with the winners announced in four categories during the PubU opening session on November 16.
Session One
If you’re an industry leader and find yourself angry, frustrated, hurt, confused, shocked, and exhausted at relating, communicating, mentoring, leading, building trust, and understanding with younger talent, then this session is for you! If you’re young and find yourself frustrated, tired of not being seen, heard, valued, given more responsibility, then this session is for you!
Regardless of which generation we belong to, it’s easy to rely on our entrenched methodologies that led to any current success -- yet applying those techniques to others fail to achieve our desired results. To become more compassionate, empathetic, transparent, vulnerable, and adaptable requires an incredible amount of energy and time which is often at odds with traditional structures.
In our research of asking executives, managers, senior creatives and young designers, we continue to hear that managers and team members feel lost and confused with each other, which contributes to younger creatives moving on in hopes that that will solve what they’re after. We also believe this is contributing to our cultural discontent, and worse, our disillusionment around life purpose and mission, creating even deeper divides between generations. We can do better!
We will explore all this and more in our session, Right Mind at Work.
Session Two
This interactive session will discuss topics that hit on important opportunities, questions, challenges and themes for 2022. Topics include: post-pandemic reboot for design teams, Adobe postscript font issue action steps, model for internships, Effective design briefs, etc.
Session Three
What is branding? How should book designers view “packaging design” within a broader branding framework? This session will help you form necessary context around author and book brands within your publishing house and collaborate effectively with your publisher, authors and other team members about important brand building initiatives.
Session Four
In this session we will take an in-depth look at design systems and how constraints can lead to creative solutions.
Session Five
Art and business. Inspiration and deadlines. Passion and criticism. Caffeine and hygiene. Designers face such paradoxes every day. Then we are shown amazing portfolios and told to do likewise. But how? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what I’ve learned so far. Yogi Berra once said, “when you come to a fork in the road, take it!”. I say when life gives you a dilemma, make dilemmanade. In this session I will give practical advice on how to design killer book covers, and why I still love it after 18 years on the job.
Session Six
Even for successful designers, pitching graphic design ideas can be stressful. How do you talk about design work? How do you develop your design vocabulary? How can you use words & storytelling to fill the mental gaps of imagination? Sometimes design doesn’t always speak for itself, even though we think it should. We will dive in and explore ways to develop the skills to walk into a client meeting with confidence and demonstrate the value of your work.
We thank the following companies for their support of the industry and this event:
PREMIUM
GENERAL
For more information on sponsoring this event, contact [email protected]
