This guest post is by Laura Brady, manager of Cross-Media at the House of Anansi Press, and the editor-in-chief of EPUBSecrets. She consults on workflow, tools, specifications, and production best practices. In her spare time she helps plan ebookcraft and follows the Blue Jays. She also probably tweets too much.
Are you still revelling in the ebookcraft afterglow and looking for ways to keep the conference stimulation going? Consider attending CreativePro Week (June 4-8 in New Orleans). CreativePro Week is a relatively new amalgamation of several longstanding conferences (and one new conference to keep things fresh).
This year’s iteration includes old-timers like the Photoshop and Illustrator Conference (aka Ps/Ai), the InDesign Conference, the print and e-publishing conference known as PePcon, and for the first time, Click, a presentation design conference added by Anne-Marie Concepción and David Blatner, the organizers behind this “super” conference. There is also a Design Deep Dive with noted designer John McWade. Last but not least, there is the well-established Creative Developers Summit, which is attended by the insanely talented scripters whom I love so much.
As the name suggests, CreativePro Week is designed for creative professionals and offers content that appeals to beginners, as well as content tailored for more experienced people. The sessions vary from the three-hour pre-conference tutorials designed to introduce attendees to, for example, the basics of HTML and CSS, to short 45-minute to one-hour sessions on really specific topics. This year at PePcon, there will be talks called Lies Your Printer Has Told You, Three Forward-Looking Publishing Processes, and Ebook Design Is Not an Oxymoron. Every single time I have attended, I come away with at least one new trick or tool that makes me more efficient.
But here's one of the main things I've found after attending PePcon and its antecedents for seven years or so: The community is incredible. The people who put it on are enthusiastic, friendly, and smart and that feathers out into all aspects of the conference. The speakers are more gregarious than is the norm. And the attendees are warm, eager to learn, and happy to help if they can.
And the conference moves around, which adds an extra layer of fun. (I think they should only stage in MLB cities, but not everyone shares my baseball obsession, apparently – weird.) I have been to San Francisco, Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Atlanta. I am very much looking forward to this year’s edition in New Orleans – and may add a day or two to my journey for eating and drinking purposes.
