The empty stage before doors: a lectern, a single chair, and a clock projected huge on the back wall, house lights half up
Running order09:00 — 18:00Both days · Ambassador Theatre

Nothing runsat the sametime as anything.

Every talk is thirty minutes with ten for questions. Breaks are long on purpose — the corridor is half the point. If a talk overruns, the break absorbs it, not the next speaker.

Times are fixed and published early so you can book flights around them. The running order may shift; the clock will not.

Friday 14 May

Day one
08:45First-timers' coffee, upstairs bar
09:00Doors and registration
09:30

The typeface that ate the brand

Adaeze Okafor · Ledger Foundry

10:10Coffee in the lobby
10:40

Motion is a spelling mistake

Mira Halvorsen · Studio Pell

11:20

Everything I shipped that nobody used

Tomas Reinholt · Northbound

12:00Lunch — served in the circle bar
13:30

Against the design system

Yun-Seo Bae · Corvid

14:10

Drawing badly, on purpose, for money

Lucia Ferrer · Independent

14:50Coffee, and the book stall opens
15:20

Forty years of one alphabet

Kenji Morita · Morita Kobo

16:00

I deleted the homepage and nothing happened

Petar Vukčević · Rivet & Rule

16:40

Making a book nobody asked for

Sable Whitlock · Bright Hall Press

17:20

Sound design for things nobody listens to

Robin Kestrel · The Quarry Room

18:00Day one closes
19:30Drinks at the Fillmore, two doors down

Saturday 15 May

Day two
09:00Doors, coffee, no registration queue
09:30

Photographs of things that don't exist

Rohan Bhatt · Field & Frame

10:10Coffee in the lobby
10:40

Twenty years of the same three mistakes

Curtis Ambrose · Ambrose & Co.

11:20

The client is not the audience

Ines Marchetti · Casa Verso

12:00Lunch — served in the circle bar
13:30

The archive is the product

Nour Haddad · Verso Bindery

14:10

What I learned printing four thousand posters

Marcus Delaney · Detroit Letterpress

14:50Coffee, and the print sale opens
15:20

Interfaces that admit they are guessing

Priya Raghavan · Corvid

16:00

Against the portfolio

Jonah Weiss · Independent

16:40

Colour, for people who don't see it your way

Ellery Sun · Okonkwo Studio

17:20

How to end a talk

Devon Achebe · The Long Table

18:00Closing remarks, then the lobby until they throw us out
Thursday 13 May

The day before, for sixty people

Three half-day workshops, twenty seats each, in the rehearsal rooms above the theatre. Only available with a workshop pass.

Workshop passes
09:30

Drawing a lowercase g in one morning

Kenji Morita · Rehearsal room A · 20 seats

09:30

Editorial systems that survive contact

Ines Marchetti · Rehearsal room B · 20 seats

13:00Lunch for everyone on the workshop day
14:00

Photographing your own work properly

Rohan Bhatt · The stage, lights up · 20 seats

18:00Workshop day ends · informal dinner, pay your own way
The theatre at the end of the night: house lights up, seats empty, one person still standing in the aisle looking back at the stage
Nine days is how long it took last year

Take a seatwhile therestill is one.

Get your ticketMay 14–15, 2027 · Detroit
Marquee

A two-day conference for people who make things and then have to explain them. Held at the Ambassador Theatre, 2110 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan.

[email protected]

© 2027 Marquee. Fourth edition. Detroit, Michigan.

Photography by Della Okonkwo and Sam Fetterman.

Swebsy