Robert Generette III, known to most as RobZilla, is an illustrator and art educator who calls himself a vector art monster. Drawing mostly on an iPad Pro, he has made sports portraits and murals for the Washington Wizards, Golden State Warriors, Washington Capitals, Nike Baseball, NASCAR and D.C. United. His work pairs traditional art training with a love of sports and new drawing tools.

Mandi Caskey, known as Miss Birdy, is a nationally recognized muralist and public artist based in Columbus, Ohio. For more than 13 years, she has built a career creating large-scale work that transforms architecture into immersive, story-driven experiences. Her murals can be found internationally, and her work has brought her into collaboration with Fortune 500 companies, major brands, cultural organizations, and communities across the world.

Blending surreal realism, bold color, and intricate symbolism, Caskey’s work explores identity, transformation, nature, and the complexity of the human experience. Her practice moves between monumental public art and intimate studio work, carrying the same sense of depth and narrative across both. Whether spanning hundreds of feet or contained within a canvas, her work is designed to feel deeply personal while existing at a scale larger than life.

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Award Winning Entrepreneur & Brand Hysteria Expert

Top Innovator in Retail -The Boston Globe

Americas Best Entrepreneur -BusinessWeek

If you dream of inspiring cult-like brand loyalty—the kind that involves mile-long queues and even permanent tattoos—Johnny Cupcakes is for you. The founder of the world-renowned, food-themed tee-shirt brand Johnny Cupcakes, Johnny’s known for helping other people create blueprints for the unexpected sprinkles — giving people more than what they’re expecting through surprise and delight.  This recipe helps build brand loyalty, create memorable experiences, and inspire innovation.

With global bakery-themed T-shirt pop-up shop openings, thousands of customers with his logo tattooed on themselves, people who camp out for his products, and high-profile collaborations with giants such as The Simpsons, Power Rangers, and Nickelodeon, Johnny was named America’s Best Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek, Top Innovator in Retail by The Boston Globe, and featured in INC magazine’s INC 500.

Despite being in one of the most difficult product categories to stand-out in, and a founder of a brand when he was just 19 years old, Johnny’s solution to his business challenges was to create such a unique brand experience that his customers would loyally line-up around the block, time and time again, just to be able to sport his logo on their clothing.

Since then, through his talks and creative consulting, Johnny has shared his strategies with clients that include Apple, L’Oreal, Disney, IBM, Audi, Harvard University, Wieden+Kennedy, Marriott, and P&G.  Also a TEDx speaker, Johnny has been featured in media such as MTV, NPR, Forbes, WIRED, and as a case study in several branding and business books.

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Gloria Umanah is the founder and executive director of Hope Booth, an Atlanta nonprofit that turns old telephone booths into free, round-the-clock spaces for hope and mental health help. Its booths now stand in schools, prisons and public spaces across three continents. Shaped by her own experience with homelessness, her work earned her a 2025 L'Oreal Paris Women of Worth honor.

Jason Craig is an illustrator and designer in Augusta, Georgia, a Midwest transplant with about two decades in the business. He has made work for the Atlanta Braves, LEGO, Hot Wheels, Fortnite and the Augusta GreenJackets, and he has colored comics for DC and Disney. Augusta Magazine named him Best Visual Artist in 2025.

Rocky Roark is the founder and design director of Blue Cyclops Design Co., a studio he started in 2016 to build illustration-led brand stories. A graphic design graduate of Georgia Southern University, he designed at Focus Lab and Digital Telepathy before going out on his own. His work covers branding, illustration and web design.

Building a creative career without forgetting why you started making things in the first place.

For more than a decade, Lisa Quine has made a career out of making things—painting murals across the country and abroad, collaborating with major brands, and creating work for some of Cleveland’s most recognizable places. But turning creativity into a career can do something strange: the thing you once did for fun becomes deadlines, contracts, expectations, and the constant pressure to figure out what’s next.

In The Serious Business of Play, Lisa looks back at the successes, mistakes, risks, and unexpected wake-up calls that shaped her career—and what happened when she finally gave herself permission to stop chasing the next job and start playing again. That experiment became Illuminated, a 26-piece solo exhibition exploring her life and career since art school, and a reminder that play isn’t the opposite of serious work—sometimes, it’s where our best work begins.

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Temi Coker is a Nigerian-American multidisciplinary artist who grew up in Lagos and now lives in Dallas. He works across photography, graphic design and art direction, using bright color and pattern to celebrate Black life and the African diaspora. An Adobe Creative Residency alum, he was a campaign artist for the 93rd Oscars and made the 2026 Texas Book Festival poster.

Gemma O’Brien is an Australian artist and designer working across typography, illustration, calligraphy, murals and large-scale public art. Combining traditional hand-painted techniques with contemporary art and design, her work spans commercial commissions, exhibitions and site-specific installations. Clients include NASA, Apple, Google, Nike, Tiffany & Co., Qantas, The New York Timesand leading international musicians. Her large-scale work has appeared internationally, with a public artwork held in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. An award-winning designer and international speaker, Gemma has delivered more than 50 talks worldwide on creativity, art and design.

Matt Dawson is an Austin creative director, designer and illustrator, known to many badge and logo fans as Staygray Ponyboy. His branding, illustration and type work has served Jeep, Major League Baseball, Toyota, Disney, Pearl Jam and Phish. He also founded Crop, a grassroots creative conference in Austin that brings makers together from across the country.

Darold Pinnock is a designer, calligrapher and letterer who was born in Jamaica, raised in New York and now lives just outside Atlanta. He has been building brands through design since 2006. He also hosts the Passion Behind The Art Show, a series of conversations with fellow creatives about the people and mindset behind the work.

Anton Duong is an Orlando multimedia designer and the owner of StickerPrintGo, which makes custom stickers and designs for local small businesses. He brings more than 15 years of print, video, photography and identity work, and he also teaches. He created Stick'N Slap, an Orlando event that gathers Florida artists and businesses around stickers as portable art.

Katrina J Lenzly is a creative director and the owner of ELEV8ED. Raised on Atlanta's southside, she found her design voice working at a skate shop before studying at SCAD. As an art director she has made work for HBO, the NBA and The Coca-Cola Company, and she also performs neo-soul hip-hop as King Cooley.

Jordan Giesler is the creative director for the Kansas City Chiefs, where he started as a graphic design intern and worked his way up over about a decade. He leads the team's creative work, from logos and Super Bowl rings to big marketing campaigns. He is a two-time Super Bowl champion, a husband and a dad to daughters.

Daniel Luft is a senior brand designer at Heyo, based in Athens, Georgia, where he looks after the studio's brand system. His focus is logo design, identity and art direction, with work that includes Solana Mobile's Seeker and the Wire Park identity. Before Heyo, he was a senior brand designer at Unfold and a creative director at SEOteric.

Tyler Pate is a graphic designer, illustrator and art director who grew up in the small town of Coward, South Carolina. His playful, colorful illustrations bring everyday objects to life, and he has worked as an art director at Paramount and as a designer for Vita Coco. Through his Creative Pain account, he shares his process and helps other creatives push through creative block.

There is so much inspiration in our surroundings that we tend to ignore. It is all about training our eyes to see ordinary everyday things from a different angle, reimagining the world around us. You decide whether you want to be camouflaged within somebody else's approach, or to discover unexplored areas of design through a journey into blending the analogue and digital worlds!

Bio:

Tina Touli is the founder and creative director of T&T Studio, a boutique multidisciplinary creative studio based in London. She's played with type, branding, graphics, motion, 3D, and pretty much everything in between, for brands like Apple, Adobe, Tate, CNN, Dell, HP, Guinness, Converse and more. Never afraid to get her hands dirty, she brings an experimental hands-on approach to everything she makes, whether that means cutting, painting, sculpting or building, blending the analogue and digital in ways that feel anything but ordinary. When she's not making beautiful things, she's talking about making them at conferences like OFFF, Graphika Manila, Adobe MAX and FITC. Basically, creating is just who she is.

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Dylan Menges founded Menges Design in 2015, a studio that stays small on purpose and works across identity, illustration and murals. His hands-on approach has served clients such as Sherwin-Williams and Siemens, and he teaches Procreate workflows to fellow designers.