Schedule
Sep 30-Oct 2, 2026
Join us for the Circles Conference Design edition. We have an exciting lineup of speakers and workshops planned. Check out the schedule below for more details.
Night before Design Workshops
Workshops Sold Separately. View Workshop Details →
7:00 pm
Circles Mixer
Party
Bohemian Bull
1112 W Northwest Hwy
Grapevine, TX 76051
Design Workshops & Opening Mixer
Workshops Sold Separately. View Workshop Details →
8:00 am
Registration & Coffee
8:30 am
Workshop 01
Workshop Classes
Paul Sirmon
Be Better on Monday
Whitney Holden Rush
From Classroom to Career: How Community and Culture Create Competitive Work
10:30 am
Workshop 02
Workshop Classes
Cole Friedman
Don't Make Boring Logos
Charlie Howlett
AI in Practice: Leading Through Fear and Hype
12:00 pm
Lunch
Food will not be provided, but Harvest Hall on the first floor offers a variety of dining options.
1:30 pm
Workshop 03
Workshop Classes
Jess Goldsmith
Dynamic Text Effects in Adobe Illustrator
Shawna White & Febe Prado
The 6 Things Quietly Killing Great Design
3:30 pm
Workshop 04
Workshop Classes
Dustin Cooper
Beyond the Graphic: Turning Sermons Into Visual Stories
Broc Baird
Tell It On Purpose: Designing Stories People Actually Feel
7:00 pm
Circles Opening Mixer
Party
3 Barrels Beer Garden
1200 William D Tate Ave
Grapevine, TX 76051
Directions →
Design Day 1
8:00 am
Registration & Coffee
9:00 am
Kickoff Design Day 1
9:15 am
Session 01
Keynote
Joshua Lee
The Brand Shift: Finding the Story That Makes Your Brand Stand Alone
Every era has a scarce resource. Land. Machines. Data. We’ve entered a new one — and what’s scarce now is meaning.
AI has shifted everything. When any business can produce polished content at speed, execution is no longer the edge. The leaders who win from here will be the ones who can do something no tool can — find the one story that only their brand can tell.
That’s the brand shift. And most aren’t ready for it.
This session will show a new view about strategy, creativity, and your role in an AI-driven world.
10:15 am
Session 02
Keynote
Jess Goldsmith
Being Talented Isn't Enough: Building a Sustainable Creative Career with Strategic Decision Making
This is a tough-love, highly actionable talk and mini workshop is for creatives who want to do work they love, make real money from it, and keep their identity intact as they grow. It includes quick exercises that attendees can do in the moment to help gain clarity on their future success
Practical takeaways:
Why talent is often a comforting excuse and how vague choices keep creatives stuck
A 3-decision framework to build a career they can actually sustain
Maintenance fees of long-term success: visibility, skill, boundaries, and self
How to scale without becoming a performance: values > aesthetics
“No List” exercise attendees can use immediately to protect their time, energy, and integrity
10:55 am
30 Minute Break
11:25 am
Session 03
Keynote
Josh Wood
12:05 pm
Lunch (2 hrs)
2:15 pm
Session 04
Keynote
Katie Johnson + Ilana Griffo
Follow Your Art: Finding Your Creative Voice
“How do I find my style” is the question we get most often, and it’s the wrong one. This session will help you get out of your own way and quiet the outside noise so you can turn up your own creative volume. We’ll talk about showing up fully, screwing perfectionism and building a practice that’s truly your own.
3:15 pm
Session 05
Keynote
Dave Korinek
3:55 pm
30 Minute Break
4:25 pm
Session 06
Keynote
Dora Drimalas
Create things worth keeping.
The best brands don’t just create impressions. They create artifacts, memories, communities, and experiences that people choose to keep.
In an age of infinite content and shrinking attention spans, what makes an idea worth remembering?
Drawing from the stories and projects featured in Hybrid: Curiosity in All Things, designer Dora Drimalas explores how curiosity fuels creativity, how creativity shapes experiences, and why the most enduring brands create things people choose to keep—not just consume.
From Nike and Amazon to Mohawk, Sonos, and The North Face, this talk examines how meaningful brands move beyond campaigns to create publications, environments, packaging, events, and objects that become lasting artifacts of culture. Along the way, Dora shares how a lifelong practice of collecting ideas, exploring unexpected interests, and connecting seemingly unrelated disciplines has shaped Hybrid’s approach to design for more than twenty-five years.
At its heart, Hybrid: Curiosity in All Things is a conversation about designing with intention in a world obsessed with speed. It argues that while digital experiences are essential for reach, physical experiences create memory. The brands that endure aren’t simply the loudest or the newest—they’re the ones that leave people with something worth holding onto.
Whether you’re a designer, marketer, educator, or creative leader, you’ll leave with a new perspective on curiosity as a creative discipline, brand experience as behavior, and permanence as a powerful strategy for building brands that matter.
Design Day 2
6:00 am
CirclesFit 5K
Meet in front of the Palace Arts Center
8:00 am
Registration & Coffee
9:00 am
Kickoff Design Day 2
9:15 am
Session 01
Keynote
Hannah Smith + Jesse MacKenzie
Divide and Conquer: How We Leverage Our Wildly Different Skillsets
A deep dive into our unique work 2-person workflow. How we learned to accept our weaknesses, leaned into our strengths, and found the power of working together instead of just next to each other.
9:55 am
Session 02
Keynote
Lance Hart
An Inside Job: How I Snuck in and Rebranded a Bank
When Lance first stepped into a newly rebranded bank, there was no appetite for another overhaul – only expectations to make it work. Over the next five years, he quietly reshaped perception, behavior, and strategy from within. In this talk, he’ll unpack how real change happens when you don’t have control, perfect conditions, or permission to start over. From influencing executives to surviving creative gridlock, this session is about learning to operate inside constraints and still move a brand forward. If you’ve ever had to build something meaningful without stopping the machine, this is for you.
10:25 am
10 Minute Break
10:35 am
Session 03
Keynote
Rocky Roark
Losing the Studio, Keeping the Craft
In early 2025, I was running a five-person studio bringing in over $50K in revenue each month. Over three days, more than half of that recurring revenue disappeared. Three months later, 80% was gone and so was my team.
What I built next is the actual talk. Broke and out of options, I built myself an AI business coach because I couldn’t afford a real one. Two weeks later I signed my first new client in five months. That one experiment turned into an operations layer that now runs most of my studio: the follow-ups, the pipeline, the proposals, the admin that eats a designer’s week and that my ADHD brain has fought for twenty years.
It does not touch the craft. That line is the whole talk, and finding it took eight months of trial and error.
I’ll walk through exactly how a one-person studio runs on this, where I drew the line between the machine’s work and mine, and why I think every designer is going to have to draw that line soon, on purpose or by default. Not a productivity pitch. Just what actually worked, what it cost me to learn, and what I’d hand you if you were starting tomorrow.
11:05 am
Lunch & Yoga (2 hrs)
Yoga starts at 11:15 AM. Meet at the Gazebo across from Palace Arts Center.
1:05 pm
Session 04
Keynote
Crystal Schaefer
Designing Disruption
Brands have one job: be remembered.
Our brains remember what is novel. What is different. That memory influences preference, prompts behavior, and ultimately, drives sales.
And sales are what your client cares about.
But what if the brand or product isn’t interesting enough to inspire exciting creative? What if your client is competing for “sort by price” consumers in an overcrowded category of sameness? What if there is no revolutionary product with features that sell themselves?
In this keynote, Crystal Schaefer breaks down the strategies and methods for designing disruption — challenging category conventions, uncovering the distinct narratives, and engineering creative ideas that become a competitive advantage.
1:45 pm
Session 05
Keynote
Sara Beukema + Megan Hopkins
Position Yourself Without the Ick
We’ve all been there. Someone asks what you do, and you immediately start listing services. “I design logos” or “I build websites.” But that doesn’t capture the real magic you bring. If you’re ready to start communicating your value more clearly, this session is for you.
You’ll learn how to position yourself around the problems you solve, so you can talk about your work with clarity, confidence, and zero “salesy” energy. Whether you’re working toward a promotion or want to attract more aligned clients, discover how to communicate your impact, stand out in a crowded market, and make it easier for the right people to say yes to you.
Led by Sara Beukema and Megan Hopkins of Merit & State, this high-energy session will help you stop playing small and start showing up as the industry expert you actually are.
2:15 pm
10 Minute Break
2:25 pm
Session 06
Keynote
Brad Bishop + Mike Thurman
Built on Passion
Built on Passion is a conversation about the passion behind great sports identities. From the designer’s sketchbook to the fans who proudly wear the mark, we’ll explore how thoughtful design becomes something people truly connect with.