Once Already, Back When Düsseldorf Turned Five

Irene has been on the beyond tellerrand stage before with Anton Repponen as Anton & Irene and talked about “Collaborating Across UX & Design”. That is twelve years ago, something I only properly realised while writing this … well, time flies ;)

Three Months a Year That Nobody Ordered

The studio the two of them run out of Brooklyn built the digital homes for the Met Museum in New York and M+ in Hong Kong, redesigned USA Today and worked with Spotify, Google, Kickstarter, Balenciaga, IKEA and the BBC. The thing I always liked a lot, though is, that they keep three months of every year free for their own, self-initiated projects. Not as a marketing idea, but because they wanted to keep making things that nobody had ordered. In an industry where everybody talks about side projects and nobody finds the time, that is a decision I have a lot of respect for and appreciate a lot.

Next to this Irene wrote two books, Universal Principles of UX and, published this year, The Accessible Design Reference & Specification Book. She is a member of AGI, she co-chairs the Interaction Design Master’s programme at Harbour.Space in Barcelona and Bangkok and she teaches Ethical, Accessible & Mindful Design at ECAL.

A Whole Continent as the Brief

As I said above, I had the chance to see some of her latest work and that is something where I think it should be part of beyond tellerrand. For a while now she has been working with the Danish think tank 21st Europe, right at the point where design meets policy. Together they develop what they call Blueprints: speculative proposals that explore how Europe could rethink policy, technology and design, and how you can make complex systems understandable, human and future-focused.

Policy is one of those things most of us only experience once it is finished. It arrives as a form to fill out, a rule to follow, a piece of infrastructure we have to live with and hardly ever does it feel like somebody thought about the people using it. Watching someone take all the craft that goes into a museum website and point it at a whole continent instead is something I find absolutely exciting. And since I know Irene, I know that she will not only show you the nice pictures, but also tell you how the sausage was made, where it did not work and what she learned along the way. Very much looking forward to that.

Say hello and welcome to Irene Pereyra!

beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 is taking place on 19 and 20 April.

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If his face feels familiar, you might have seen him on Kevin Powell’s YouTube channel, giving a CSS Typography Crash Course while trying to talk over his own very loud keyboard. And since Kevin is already on board for 2027, I simply love the idea of the two of them sharing the same stage in April. Full circle, you know?

Who is Roel

Roel is an independent developer from the Netherlands. He calls himself a creative software developer, GitHub knows him as a “computernerd from hell” and he has been writing software since the Y2K problem. He loves the web, fonts, webfonts and, as he puts it, all combinations thereof. Most of his work happens under the name PixelAmbacht.

His client list reads like a small who’s who of type. For Font Awesome he helped engineer their icon fonts and modernise the CSS used on tens of millions of websites. For Google Fonts he built showcase sites and did prototyping and font engineering for the Noto Emoji font. He worked on the front end for Typotheque, The Type Founders and NaN’s fonts.xyz, and on several projects for LettError, who you might remember from our stage back in 2013.

Serious Fun With Fonts

What I like a lot about Roel is the mischief. I mean, scroll through his blog and you find a Commodore 64 demo built in pure CSS, a font that breaks browsers, Mr. Poo (the world’s first animated colour emoji font, and yes, it is 💩) and Sans Bullshit Sans, a font that uses ligatures to replace buzzwords with a censorship bar. I love it and shared that one on my own blog back then.

But underneath the jokes there is real depth. In 2016 he took Font Awesome’s font files apart, trimmed the fat and did the maths: with the font running on around 73 million websites, those few saved kilobytes added up to almost 2000 terabytes a day. A little later he was working on those very fonts himself. He writes about things like the variable font inheritance problem and the hidden superpower of optical sizes and at CSS Day 2024 he gave a wonderful and great talk called “Problems Solved by OpenType”.

And when he is not building websites or fonts? He writes 6502 machine language for the C64, rides and repairs old motorcycles, listens to loud music (🤘) and, in his own words, is a funny dad.

Why Roel Fits beyond tellerrand

Type has been part of beyond tellerrand since the very first edition. And still, for many of us maybe, a font is something we pick, load and then forget about. Roel is the person who reminds you that fonts have settings too, that there is a whole world of features hiding inside those files and that exploring them can be ridiculously good fun. Nerdy, generous with his knowledge and never taking himself too seriously. That is exactly the mix I love to have on stage.

Oh, and in case you wonder how to pronounce his name: his about page has a cartoon of two robots next to a sign that says “Rule: Knee Scans”. Say it fast. ;)

Welcome on board, Roel!

beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.

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Usually and if possible, I want to meet a person before I invite them to speak. With Chiara that happened at a few events in the past and so i Knew her character and what I’d get, when inviting her for 2027. Vivid, warm, full of positive energy and with a story for everything.

Who is Chiara

Chiara is an Italian brand designer and UX strategist and the founder of Until Sunday, the studio she started in 2012. She grew up in a small town in Sicily, studied design at the Politecnico di Milano on a scholarship, working shifts in fast food restaurants to pay her way and spent years in agencies before going her own way. Since then she has shaped brands and digital products for tech startups, open source communities like Joomla and Mautic and global organisations. She also designed Vitaly Friedman’s Web Adventures website. You may have seen her on stage at SmashingConf in New York and Antwerp, at Fronteers or at the Awwwards Conference. Today she runs her studio from the island of Syros in Greece, where she lives with her husband and her cat.

Why Chiara is Taking The beyond tellerrand Stage

Her story starts with her grandmother Lina, a seamstress who could barely write, but turned plain fabric into dresses that made people leave the room a little taller. Lina told her there is nothing more beautiful than a person changed for the better because of your work. That is what Chiara decided design should do. She still thinks of a brand like a dress: it must not try to fit everyone, it has to fit the right people.

And then there is Creative Exchange. In her studio in Hermoupolis she invites one guest at a time to share the story behind their work. A room for around thirty people, free for speakers and attendees, with the bar next door open for the conversations afterwards. Honest stories, a small room, people who stay. I think, I don’t need to tell you why that made me smile. ;)

I am happy she in onboard and say: hello Chiara!

beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.

Get your ticket

Most of the times I meet a person, before I invite them to come and speak. Sometimes, though, you don’t meet and the least I try then is to jump on one or a few video calls to see who that person is, if they fit into the idea of beyond tellerrand and, well, to simply get a feeling for that person. During my call with Hannah it pretty quickly was clear, that she’d fit my idea of the event and her topic surely is more important that ever.

Who is Hannah

Hannah is Director of Operations at the Green Web Foundation, the not-for-profit working towards a fossil-free internet by 2030. If you have ever checked whether a site runs on green hosting, used CO2.js or read Branch magazine, you most likely have used something her team built. She arrived there by way of a computer science degree, years as a freelance WordPress developer in Bristol, teaching on a developer bootcamp and seven years at the Environment Agency managing large change projects. In 2020 she started Green Tech South West, which is still running and still free. She lives deep in Exmoor National Park, in one of Britain’s few remaining temperate rainforests and has written about watching a month of rain fall there in a few hours.

Why Hannah is Taking The beyond tellerrand Stage

Well, what made me want her on this stage, though, is not the tooling. In a talk called “Start at the end” she argued that our industry is rubbing humanity away one click at a time in the name of efficiency and that digital sustainability is quietly picking up the same habit. Her answer is not a better metric. It is better stories about the future we are supposedly building, because beliefs come from stories rather than from charts and far more time spent playing, because play is where imagination comes from. She closed by demanding more play in one of the most relentlessly rational industries there is.

She describes her own job as enabling joyful and effective delivery. Not as a perk. As the work.

beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.

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Kevin and I have crossed paths plenty of times over the years, mostly around SmashingConf and other events. And he is exactly the same person off stage as on it. Calm, funny, no act, genuinely more interested in whether you understood the thing than in whether you were impressed by it. We were chatting for a while and I am happy we finally got together. So: welcome, Kevin.

You Have Probably Met Him Already

If you have ever been stuck on a layout at eleven at night, searched for an answer and ended up watching a calm Canadian explain why your thing is not doing the thing, then you know him. Over a thousand(!) videos on his YouTube channel, almost all of them about CSS and more than a million people subscribed! Free and paid courses, a weekly newsletter, a podcast. His own description of the job is beautifully modest, though: he helps people fall in love with CSS and, failing that, at least be a little less frustrated by it.

People have taken to calling him “the King of CSS” and he wrote an article explaining, politely but firmly, why the title does not fit. That reaction tells you more about him than any subscriber count does.

The Talk: How a Hobby Becomes a Life

Here is the part I am most pleased about. Kevin could very easily have come to Düsseldorf and nerded out about attr(), style queries and if() and it would have been a great talk! Instead he suggested something else and I said yes immediately.

He wants to talk about how he became “the CSS guy”. Not as a personal retrospective, but as a worked example of something much more useful: how a random hobby can quietly turn into a passion and how a passion, given about ten years, can turn into something far bigger than you ever planned for.

It is worth knowing how crooked the route actually was. He studied film, picked up a BA in Urban Studies and then took a vocational degree in graphic design. Long before that he was building web pages in the late 90s as a teenager, slicing up Photoshop comps and rebuilding them as HTML tables. His own verdict on that work: terrible and a ton of fun. 😁 He worked in print design at a small company, freelanced on UI design in the evenings, figured that if people paid him to design a site they might pay him to build it too, and then discovered he preferred the building.

Then an old teacher rang him out of the blue and asked whether he wanted to teach. He said yes, was handed the beginner web classes, loved it and after two years wanted to go deeper than the syllabus allowed. So he started a YouTube channel. Not as a business plan. As an excuse to keep learning.

Five years in a classroom, nine years and counting online and a million people who now find CSS a bit “less frightening”. None of that was the plan.

Why This Fits beyond tellerrand

beyond tellerrand has always been for people who care about their craft and about why they do it and this is the second half of that sentence. Most of us did not arrive where we are by design. Well most certainly I didn’t. We followed something we found interesting, kept following it and looked up years later somewhere we could not have predicted.

Kevin has a great version of that story. And, you know, I love the idea of him telling it honestly rather than as a success formula.

beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2027 takes place on 19 and 20 April.

Get your ticket

Figuring out the flow of the day is another aspect that I really wanted to get right. It’s like making a mixtape.

I quoted him here in April 2015, in a post about how I put a schedule together and all I added below was: “That’s exactly right.”

Eleven years later Tom Arnold, who has been at nearly every beyond tellerrand since the first one in 2011, wrote his running diary of Düsseldorf 2026 and use the same metaphor: a well-made mixtape.

Well. If an idea comes back to you twice over eleven years, from two people you like, maybe it is trying to tell you something. ;)

So: Monday Mixtape

Every Monday I will pull one talk out of the archive and post it. One track. The speaker, the year, the idea and a link to watch the whole thing. That is all it is.

There are 370 talks from 29 events. Fifteen years of them. Most of them are by people who are now friends and a lot of them are better now than they were when they were new. Nobody goes back through an archive on their own, right? I mean, do you? See! So I will do it for you, one Monday at a time.

And the mixtape thing is not only a nice phrase. When I build a schedule I think about flow – the heavier talks in the morning, someone after lunch who can wake the room up again, something entertaining in the evening slot and a closing talk that people carry home with them. Then I leave it on the table overnight and look at it again the next morning to see whether my stomach still agrees. This is the same job, just spread over weeks and weeks instead of two days.

Track one is on Monday, 14 September: Paula Scher, Berlin 2017.

Follow along at #btconfMixtape. And if there is a talk you want to hear again, tell me – I am taking requests ;)

Stay curious!

Thirteen years. That is how long it had been since James Victore last stood on the beyond tellerrand stage in Düsseldorf and told a room full of people that their work is a gift. Some of them quit their jobs afterwards. I still hear about that talk today.

He told us, that this yea, when he walked into the empty venue the day before the event, he said the whole thing came back to him at once. The lobby, the room, the audience from 2013.

First, Everybody Stands Up

James got 500 people out of their chairs, shook them out, made them wave their arms and started singing Purple Rain until the whole room joined in. Only afterwards did he explain what had just happened: a test of your ego, your creativity and your willingness to simply play.

Create, Create, Create

The title, he told us, was not his. He found it in the programme and decided to live up to it anyway.

His argument: creating is not a job description, it is the primal drive of every living thing on the planet. The grass, the squirrels, the birds. Us. Then he did something he admitted he rarely does. He went back and looked at his own work.

There is the 1992 poster that made his reputation and, as he put it, shot him in the foot professionally at the same time. Because choosing a path means un-choosing everything else. There are the posters about the death penalty, about genocide, about racism, which he does not consider pretty and never designed to hang above your couch. Art and design as the spoonful of sugar that lets you talk about difficult things.

And there is the work that is just play. The lettering people compliment him on is finger painting. Blown up big, it looks sexy. That is the whole trick.

A Letter for his Mom

The MoMA story is worth the watch on its own. They took ten of his posters for the collection. He asked for a gala. No. A plaque. No. A letter on that gold MoMA letterhead. No.

So he asked if they would write one to his mother instead. A week and a half later, it arrived.

Ask for what you want. The universe will provide.

The Department of Probation

The section on his work for the New York City Department of Probation is a series of posters built as an answer to those awful motivational posters with the eagle on them.

Not “hang in there”, because telling probationers to hang in there is the wrong message. Instead: let go. Ask for help. Improve yourself, change the world, start here. Start small. And a line about perspective that lands harder the longer you sit with it, about how your worst enemy is trying to teach you something about yourself.

The Things That Made You Weird as a Kid

His first visual memory is a pool of melted crayons on a hot cement porch in New Mexico. Colour, beauty, and, as he found out years later when he asked his mother about it, a good deal of parental annoyance baked into the same moment.

Every book cover he designs still reaches for that. He did not know it until he went looking.

Which leads to his kids, Wyatt and Nova, who he calls his teachers. They tug at him while he is doing the dishes and he refuses to shut them down the way he was shut down. Because what they are actually saying is the thing we have all become terrible at:

Look at me. Look what I can do.

On Ai and What Comes After

He did not want to say it and then he said it anyway. He spent months trying to learn the thing, started accepting its answers and then spent a week at a time sanding those answers back into something that sounded like him. His brain, in his words, started going to mush.

His worry is not the tool. It is that we are learning not to trust ourselves.

What he is building towards instead: community, craft, skill and pride in the making. Handmade things given to each other. Underneath all of it, the same message he brought in 2013, which has not aged a day:

Your work is a gift.

Thank you, James. It was power- and wonderful, exactly as expected.

Links

→ James Victore's speaker profile
→ The speaker introduction from before the event
→ His 2013 talk “Your Work Is a Gift”
→ jamesvictore.com

Lauren Celenza had the one of the harder slots of the whole event: the very last talk, after two days of everything else. And she opened it with a confession that got a room full of raised hands.

She was tired of hearing about AI.

Then she told us this was a talk about AI anyway, but one that would go beyond the hype, beyond the doom, and, as she put it, beyond the sparkles. What followed was a thoughtful hour with a lovely closing talk.

Capability and Consequence

Lauren has spent a decade as a software designer and writer at Google, Adobe, Code for America and the World Resources Institute, and five years writing her newsletter Tech Without Losing Your Soul. Across all of it, one thread kept showing up: every technological breakthrough in human history arrives with capabilities and consequences.

She started with the first transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. A breakthrough that shrank the world and also electrocuted sharks who bit down on the high-voltage lines. We were so busy building fast communication, she said, that we forgot we were laying those cables in someone else’s home.

The moon became her image for it. A light side and a shadow side. Marjan talked about the sun the day before, Lauren noted. She would take the moon. And as tech makers, we tend to fixate on the bright side. The consequences sit out of view.

A History Most of Us Don't Know

The heart of the first half was a history lesson. In 1956, a group of scientists convened at Dartmouth College to found a new discipline around Alan Turing’s question of whether machines can think. John McCarthy first called it Automata Studies. Nobody paid attention. So they picked something more evocative: artificial intelligence. It sounded good, impressive, sophisticated. Well, and it worked. Funders came. Scientists came.

The term was a marketing move from the very beginning and as Lauren argued, that name has shaped everything since: how we name technology determines how we measure it and what we measure is what we build.

From there: Joseph Weizenbaum and ELIZA in 1964 and his colleague who knew perfectly well it was just a program and still couldn’t be interrupted while talking to it. ImageNet and AlexNet. A dinner in Silicon Valley where two men shared a fear and founded OpenAI as a nonprofit. And November 2022, when a “low-key research preview” hit a million users in five days.

Her conclusion: AI didn’t emerge purely from a desire to create or innovate. It emerged from power struggles, fear and the desire to get attention. Deeply human impulses and what gets built shapes us.

The Question at the Crux

Lauren walked through the promises we’re sold: More decisive, more innovative, faster, more efficient, more productive. Then she put the consequence next to each one. Products converging on the same chatbot and the same sparkles because everyone feels the same existential threat. Slop diluting meaning. Data centres in Frankfurt accounting for 40% of the city’s electricity demand. Productivity gains that are real, alongside pressure that is just as real.

Which brought her to the slide she asked the room to photograph:

Can we really call it intelligence, if it’s built to ignore its own consequences?

That question, she argued, is the point. Right now we mostly aren’t asking questions. We’re picking sides. AI will save us or AI will destroy us. Both sides do the same thing: they collapse our agency into inevitability. Both say the outcome is already decided, so your choices don’t matter.

Five Roles

The second half was the practical turn: five roles to experiment with. Not skills, Lauren was careful to say, but ways of being human that no model can condense into a prompt.

• The catalyst cuts through ambiguity to make the unclear visible. AI can generate endless prototypes, but it cannot generate purpose. The risk isn’t that AI replaces the designer . It’s that we outsource so much thinking that we forget what we actually believe about the problem we’re solving. We become prompt operators. Skilled at extraction, disconnected from conviction.
• The bridge connects what’s been fragmented. AI can synthesise both sides of an argument, but it can’t sit in the tension between them to build trust. Her reframe here was: not human in the loop, but human on the loop.
• The listener brings the outside world in. This is where she told the Google Maps story. Being asked in Seattle to design motorbike navigation for Southeast Asia and deciding to go outside instead. Getting on the back of a bike in Jakarta on a Friday evening. Getting lost for hours to feel the pain. Motorbike mode shipped and Google Maps went from one billion monthly users to two.
• The curator cuts through slop to protect quality and empower human choice. Because your mind becomes what it consumes and a curator with flattened taste has nothing original left to offer.
• The subverter challenges conformity when AI-driven work converges towards sameness. This one requires staying in contact with discomfort. Resisting the pull of frictionless answers, because struggle is where breakthroughs happen.

She nodded to Annie Atkins’ talk from the night before here, on how analog experiences can be the more effective ones. Polaroid’s campaign line said it well: AI can’t generate sand between your toes.

The Closing

Five things to take home: know what is actually yours. Show up for each other. Protect embodied experience. Choose what you let in. Stay in contact with discomfort.

And then the last line:

The stakes are high, but they’re not inevitable. Every choice you make shapes who we are becoming. So what will your choice be?

A great closing talk. Thank you, Lauren.

Links

→ Lauren Celenza’s speaker profile
→ The speaker introduction from before the event
→ Tech Without Losing Your Soul newsletter

Now Derivative have published a great and long interview with Brendan about his practice, his path from a seaside arcade and a Sinclair ZX81 to MoMA and also how he built those posters in TouchDesigner.

He explains the whole system: deterministic sketch-lines seeded by each speaker’s name, type chosen by that same seed, every past speaker from fifteen years shuffled into the background (has anyone actually spotted this?) and a serial number in the corner so he can recreate any poster exactly.

He describes beyond tellerrand as “always a lens to see the world differently”, which is just about the loveliest thing anyone could say about it. Thanks Brendan.

A great read on play, systems and working with data as a material!

⇾ Read “Becoming Something Else: Brendan Dawes on Play, Systems, and TouchDesigner” here

Grab your tickets early. Blind Bird Tickets went super fast after announcing them to our newsletter (newsletter hears it first, you know…) and also the Early Bird Tickets are nearly gone.

As usual we also have a scholarship program and if you can’t afford a ticket, please fill our this shot form and we have your back.

We also introduced a new ticket category called ‌Supporter Ticket. If you can afford more than the standard price, you can support the scholarship program and help others to attend.

And last but not least, if you want to jump fully in and shape this event together with us, become a Partner! Partner packages start at €500 already and we have a variety of great ideas how you can represent yourself or your company at beyond tellerrand.

Ahhh … I can’t tell you how excited I am do once more hit the ground in Düsseldorf. Maybe we meet before, but this one is set and will be great!