Owner @ Longo Designs

Nick Longo is a creative executive, educator, designer, and mentor with more than 25 years of experience building brands, leading creative teams, and helping the next generation of creatives thrive. He is the founder and Creative Director of Longo Designs and a Professor of Communication Design at California State University, Northridge, where he spearheaded the university’s first Master’s Program in Communication Design. For eight years, Nick has worked with Adobe as an independent content creator, producing hundreds of hours of Adobe Live programming, mentoring creatives, speaking at Adobe MAX, and demonstrating emerging creative and AI workflows. A frequent speaker and workshop leader, Nick has also appeared at AIGA, Creative South, and CreativeMornings, bringing together his passions for creativity, education, storytelling, community, and professional growth.

Director, Global Accessibility Experience Design @ McDonald’s Corporation

I began my career in graphic design, drawn to the craft of shaping ideas into clear, meaningful visuals. That curiosity eventually pulled me into web development, where I discovered how design and code intersect to create experiences people rely on every day. Along the way, accessibility became the through‑line — the place where creativity, technology, and human experience meet. Today, as the Director of Global Accessibility for McDonald’s, I leverage storytelling, mentorship, and practical frameworks to enable my team to help experience designers, product managers and engineers see inclusion as a powerful part of their creative toolkit and a catalyst for better work.

Illustrator @ Jess Miller Draws

Jess Miller is a Los Angeles based illustrator and designer known for her bright, bold, and whimsical style. Inspired by vintage design, nature, and the colorful spirit of Southern California, her work blends playful patterns, hand lettering, and a touch of magic. Her art has appeared on everything from phone cases and planners to packaging, books, and national brand collaborations.

Co-founder/Chief Creative Officer @ Hamagami/Carroll, Inc.

Justin is the Chief Creative Officer at Hamagami/Carroll, Inc., overseeing creative development for entertainment, video games, and biotech. His 50+ year career in the creative arts has included illustration, copywriting, design, creative direction, and client relations. He founded Hamagami/Carroll with John Hamagami in 1989. Still going strong, still learning, every day.

Chief People and Culture Officer @ Legendary Entertainment

Gaston Bitar is a transformational HR executive with deep expertise in building, scaling, and evolving world-class people strategies across the global entertainment industry. Currently serving as Chief People and Culture Officer at Legendary Entertainment, Gaston oversees all facets of human capital management, including talent strategy, DEI, organizational design, succession planning, workforce transformation, employee engagement, and ESG leadership, across the company’s film, television, digital, and publishing businesses.

Lead Design Strategist @ BMW Designworks

Across more than 20 years as an automotive designer, Michael de Bono has worked in all aspects, from advanced design through product portfolio development to production design, shaping cars that made it from sketch to the street. Today his focus is the question every creative now faces: how does human creativity stay relevant as AI reshapes the tools and knowledge share, in collaborative workflows? His provocation, “From Designer to Operator,” reframes AI not as a threat to creative work but as a shift in what it means to create. That thinking drives the Rising Talent Program, a Designworks initiative he built and continues to lead to bring emerging industrial and interaction designers into real civic and industry projects through multidisciplinary creative teamwork.

Founder & CEO @ TestParty

Michael Bervell is co-founder and CEO of TestParty, an AI-powered digital accessibility platform that fixes WCAG violations directly in a company’s source code rather than masking them with overlay widgets. Before founding TestParty, he worked in software engineering at Twitter, product management and venture investing at Microsoft, and accessibility consulting for Google and the United Nations. He holds a BA in philosophy from Harvard, a master’s in communication from the University of Washington, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is the author of Unlocking Unicorns, an active angel investor, and the youngest person ever elected to the Harvard Alumni Association Board of Directors. He grew up in Mill Creek, Washington, the son of Ghanaian immigrants.