Bridgid Agricola

HOW Design Conference              

Bridgid joined the HOW team in 2007 as art director. She has since served as a senior art director for HOW magazine and a content director for HOW Interactive Design.

She has earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design and Marketing and a Master’s Degree in Interactive Design. Currently, Bridgid is content director for the design community, which includes both HOW and Print. These two brands are dedicated to providing inspiration and information to designers through a variety of mediums, including magazines, websites, design books, online products, competitions, events and more.

Andy Epstein

Head of The BOSS Group, Merck

Andy Epstein started his career as a freelance designer and illustrator. Jumping into the world of in-house in 1992, Andy created and grew in-house design teams for Commonwealth Toy and Gund. He later restructured and expanded the hundred-person creative team at Bristol-Myers-Squibb and consulted at Johnson & Johnson. After a three year stint at Designer Greetings leading an in-house design team responsible for the company’s product lines and Point Of Sales materials, Andy has moved back into pharma heading up a 65+ managed services team for The BOSS Group at Merck.

Andy has written and spoken extensively on in-house issues and published The Corporate Creative, a book on in-house design, in partnership with F&W Publications in the spring of 2010. He is a co-founder of InSource, an association dedicated to providing support to in-house designers and design team managers and recently completed a 4 year engagement as head of INitiative the AIGA In-house Design program where he continued his efforts to empower in-house teams and raise their stature in the design and business communities.

Andrew Gibbs

The Dieline Conference

Andrew's passion for design developed at an early age when he first discovered Photoshop 4. After receiving his B.S. in graphic design from the Art Institute of California at the age of 19, he began his career in package design as a production artist for a gourmet gift company. As he moved up, he began designing products and packaging for major national retailers and brands including Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Jelly Belly. He saw a great need for daily package design inspiration for his own work, and in 2007 founded The Dieline, which quickly became the most read package design website in the world.

Andrew now serves as CEO of The Dieline, where he shares his passion for package design with millions of readers. He has since founded The Dieline Package Design Awards, the nation's leading package design award competition, and The Dieline Package Design Conference, the most attended package design conference in the world. He is also author of Box Bottle Bag - The World's Best Package Designs from The Dieline.

Ilise Benun

Creative Freelancers Business Conference 

Ilise Benun is an author, consultant, national speaker and co-founder of Marketing Mentor.

Her books include The Designer’s Guide to Marketing and Pricing; Stop Pushing Me Around: A Workplace Guide for the Timid, Shy and Less Assertive; The Art of Self Promotion; Self-Promotion Online and Designing Web Sites for Every Audience. She also co-authored Public Relations for Dummies, 2nd Edition with Eric Yaverbaum and Bob Bly. 

Her work has been featured in national publications such as HOW Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Nation’s Business, Self, Essence, Crain’s New York Business, Dynamic Graphics, IQ (a Cisco Systems magazine) and Working Woman, The New York Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, The Denver Post and more.

Debbie Millman

HOW Leadership Conference

Debbie Millman is President of the design division at Sterling Brands. She has been there for 16 years and in that time she has worked on the redesign of global brands for Pepsi, P&G, Colgate, Nestle, Hasbro and many others. Debbie Millman is President Emeritus of the AIGA, the largest professional association for design in the world. She is a contributing editor at Print magazine and Co-Founder and Chair of the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2005, she began hosting the first weekly radio talk show about design on the Internet. The show is titled Design Matters with Debbie Millman and it is now featured on DesignObserver.com. In 2011, the show was awarded a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.

She is the author of five books on design and branding, including How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer (Allworth Press, 2007), Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design (HOW Books, 2009) and Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits (Allworth, 2011).