The presentation went well. The identity is approved. Now someone has to make it work across the company, explain it to a new colleague and keep it interesting next year.
That’s the part of design we want to hear more about.
In our OFFF preview, we gravitated towards studios and their creative point of view. In-house In-focus In-person In 2027, from the people behind Brand New, moves the microphone inside the organisation. Netflix, Dr. Martens, GoodPop, Sesame Workshop and LA28 are among the teams coming to Dallas on April 8–9.
Banna Tesfay
Neil Cummings
Suzi Speedling
Derek Man
Ciara Macaulay
Leo Araujo
Amanda Charniak
Julian Mancini
Alana Louise Lyons
Dave Riley
Lynsay Reynolds
Victor Newman
Rachelle Diaz
Peter Karacas
Faye Pite Beresner
Ric EdwardsFrom logo opinions to the people living with them
A small distinction first: this is UnderConsideration’s dedicated in-house event, alongside its Brand New Conference. Both come from Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio.
Brand New has been publishing since October 2006. It began as a spin-off from Speak Up, giving lively arguments about logos a home of their own. Twenty years later, hearing from the people responsible for a brand every day feels like a useful extension of that conversation.
The in-house conference is younger. Its first edition was in Dallas in 2025; Chicago hosted the second in 2026. The third returns to Dallas’s Winspear Opera House, with 16 sessions of 45 minutes each.
The interesting bit is the job
The brief to speakers goes straight into the things portfolios tend to leave out: working with marketing and product, collaborating with outside agencies, using guidelines day to day, and finding a place for design within the company.
There’s a revealing detail in the speaking-submissions page. UnderConsideration actively welcomes pitches here because many in-house teams have no public-facing presence. Some of the work worth hearing about simply doesn’t have a studio website to announce it.
What happens to a good design idea when it becomes everybody’s day job?
We’re interested in the negotiations, the recurring requests, the small victories and the decisions that hold up six months later. Those are our questions for this lineup; individual presentation subjects haven’t been published.
Four people we’d make time for
Neil Cummings — Dr. Martens. His route runs through Wolff Olins, BBH’s ZAG and a 25-person independent creative business. Now he leads global brand creative at Dr. Martens, including its With Bouncing Soles platform. We’d like to hear how that outside-agency experience translates into changing a brand from within, especially one people already feel they own.
Amanda Charniak — GoodPop. She has led the frozen-treat brand’s creative vision since 2020, working closely with Marketing, Sales and Operations. That combination is the attraction: six years with one brand, alongside the people who sell it and make the business run. Plenty of room for a useful conversation about creative ambition meeting everyday requirements.
Faye Pite Beresner — Blood Cancer United. She helped lead the change from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The new name launched in August 2025, with an identity developed with JKR. Here’s a chance to hear from inside that change: the organisation carrying it forward among patients, supporters and staff.
Ric Edwards — LA28. He leads Brand Design and Look of the Games for the Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics. His role connects design with sport, entertainment, partnerships and operations. By April 2027, the Games will be just over a year away. The prospect of hearing how a brand becomes a physical experience, with a very real deadline, makes this a compelling closing slot.
A wider picture of in-house life
The full lineup stretches from Banna Tesfay’s consumer-products role at Netflix to Suzi Speedling’s creative team at The Michael J. Fox Foundation, with Penguin Random House, Houston Symphony, RCA, Chick-fil-A, Kimmelot, 1-800 Contacts, Weight Watchers, Sesame Workshop, Visit Albuquerque and Care.com also represented.
That breadth is part of the appeal. A city’s tourism team, a publisher and an entertainment company have different audiences and working rhythms. Hearing them in the same room could make our own constraints easier to recognise—and give us a few better ways to handle them.
Dallas, or a later viewing at home
In-person early-bird registration is $550 until December 4, 2026, then $650. Student early-bird tickets are $275. In-person attendance includes access to the recordings afterwards.
Remote access starts at $250 per person and is not a livestream. It includes hosted group viewings of the recordings on April 15–16, followed by ongoing online access from April 19. Remote registration closes April 7; its price doesn’t change at the early-bird deadline.
For anyone who has ever spent a morning defending a good idea inside their own company, this looks like an interesting room to be in.