When my friends and colleagues ask: ‘Which event or conference should I make sure to go to this year?’ I answer: ‘Let me tell you about beyond tellerrand’.
Coverage for Düsseldorf 2016
Exactly two weeks ago, when writing these lines, the sixth edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf was already running and we were looking forward to the evening talk of Dominic Wilcox at this time. What great memories I have got and how fantastic and nice and warm your feedback was. Thanks a lot! And while I am already working on the Berlin edition of 2016, I am wrapping up this year’s Düsseldorf show, collecting all blog posts and feedback.
If you found something that is not already included in this wrap up post, please let me know and I’ll add it. Also come back and check this blog posts for updates as I continuously will update it as soon as new post, new songs by Tobi or new photos and videos are released.
A Few Facts
Hundreds of burgers have been eaten at the burger truck in the yard of the Capitol Theater. Host Europe ordered ice cream for everybody during the lunch break on both days and nearly 2000 scoops of ice cream endet in the stomach of the attendees. Luckily the weather was fantastic, so that the ice cream was very welcome.
Confwall has archived 2927 tweets during the days of the event and #btconf was trending in many countries, which sadly caused a few spam-idiots to spam our wall. Sorry for this again, but I think I acted quick and got rid of those tweets.
In Düsseldorf the usage statistics for the wifi are a little lower than in Berlin. About 35 GB up and 111 GB down have been used by a total of 515 clients. Round about 70% of the devices had been Apple devices.
12 volunteers helped me onsite with the setup, to do the registration, run the exhibition and were simply there for everybody and any question during the two days and the setup. Attendees came from 21 different countries including Hong Kong, Brasil, Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, and USA, just to mention a few. Our partners made it possible that some of the attendees went away with very nice things they have won while taking part in games and challenges. Prices have been two Bose SoundLink Mini, a Raspberry Pi 3, two Arduino Starter Kits and two X-300C 6-axis gyro quad-copters by MJX – wow! Last but not least 20 wonderful partners supported the event in Düsseldorf to make it come true (see footer of the archive pages) – THANK YOU ALL!
Photos
I know of at least 4 people – Juliane, Stefan, Martin and Andreas – who took photos at the event. So far two of them have published their sets of photos and one of them, Andreas Dantz, had a data crash on one of the SD cards. As soon as Martin and Stefan publish their sets, I’ll update this post. If you have taken and photos, please let me know as I am happily include them as well.
- Juliane Schütz of Tollwerk has taken a lovely set of photos of the main event as well as of the IndieWebCamp, which took place as one of the Side Events this year.
- Andreas Dantz was able to rescue a few of the photos he took and was able to upload them to Flickr. Sad that he does not have all of them anymore as those he rescued a very nice.
- Really nice set of photos by Patrick Westerhoff of the event and Side Events.
- Dirk Döring was late to the game, but added a very nice set of photos catching the atmosphere and good vibe.
Blog Posts
I say thank you to everybody who makes the effort to write her/his opinion and wrap up of the event. I love to get feedback and of course the warm words most of them have for my event are the fuel that keep me running.
- Eva-Lotta Lamm has written a nice blog post with the sum-up of her favourite talks as well as all sketch notes she took during the two days.
- Liane Kirschner was at the very first beyond tellerrand and is looking forward to come back year by year since then. She has written a lovely sum-up of this year. I don’t agree on the statement, that it was not as much “beyond the tellerrand” (outside the box) as in past years, as I think it actually was a lot, but I understand – of course – that I can’t meet everybody’s expectations every year. I’d love to say thank you though to her very kind and warm words to my work:
Beyond Tellerrand is for sure the most familiar and friendly event for people interested in design and tech I’ve ever been to. Marc Thiele, the organizer – or let’s say father – of the conference does an amazing job there. Thank you for that.
Thanks to you, Liane, for being part of it!
- Björn Odendahl, who created all the pixel graphics for this year’s Düsseldorf edition, has written a great story with some background on the artwork for beyond tellerrand 2016 in Düsseldorf. Even if you haven’t been there, you will get some historical information on earlier days of using a computer ;)
- In his short statement about the event and pointing people to another fab blog post, Tom Arnold says
the way (then) total strangers welcomed me at the first evening's warm-up, the friendly atmosphere between the talks, all this was not the exception but turned out to be the rule.
Fantastic to read and exactly what I was hoping to establish over the years. It is just great to see that there are so many people, who thinking and living exactly like this!
- Matthias Ott, whom I mentioned above already, answers the question “So why go there after all?” with “The answer is: people.” – and I have to say, he got it. No matter if you think about speakers, partners, attendees or the onsite team behind the event, it is about the people all together making it what it is. Thanks for your article, Matthias
- Also Christoph, who has written me an email, exactly recognised the same as Matthias. In his email it said at one point ”Was diese Konferenz so besonders gemacht hat, sind die Menschen[…]”, which translates ”What makes the conference to special, are the people[…]” – wonderful feedback. Thank you!
- Manuel Schulz has been at beyond tellerrand for the first time. Not only did he win a ticket at another event, but he was lucky enough to also win one of the drones that were a price by Accenture Digital. See how he describes his experiences at beyond tellerrand.
- Christian Huber has written a very complete review with details to every talk. Thanks a lot for the work and I’m happy you all had a good time, Christian!
- In a short intverview one of the jambit team, who attended #btconf in Düsseldorf, talks about his impressions and experiences.
- Nice and complete review by PPW who had a couple of people attending. Including short statements of individual employees.
- Steffen Rademacker has written a short, yet very warm text about his days at the IndieWebCamp and beyond tellerrand. In addition to that you find a nice set of photos from those days. But personally, most important to me is this paragraph of the post:
What I really like the most about this whole event, is that the asshole-rate tends to be close to zero. So many open-minded and friendly people from the tech- and web-industry in one place — I think that's hard to find and to accomplish.
Thank you, Steffen!
- Florenz Heldermann has written a late blog post with his thoughts on beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf, including reviews for some of his favourite talks.
- Jessica Lazarus has written a lovely, German, summary of the show in Düsseldorf. Next to the write-up, she also created four posters for her four favourite talks. Thanks, Jessica!
- Phil Shackleton has written a little blog post about “The benefits and challenges of Web conferences” in which he mentions beyond tellerrand and says:
beyond tellerrand is without doubt, one of the most inspirational conferences I’ve ever been too […]
Wow. That is very nice and makes me really happy. Glad you liked it, Phil.
Videos
As for all the past events, the event pages automatically turn into an archive for the event in Düsseldorf on which the videos, where I have the right to publish as well as slides (if sent) and other coverage to the talk and/or speaker will be collected and published.
Up to now 11 of 13 talks are online which are:
- Tobias Baldauf and his talk about “Your Hero Images Need You! Save the Day with HTTP2 Image Loading”.
- WebGL magic in the talk ”Unreal.js” by Michael Chang.
- Lil Chen gave “Advice from a young designer to younger designers”.
- “Designing Meaningful Animation” is important and Val Head spoke about how to exactly do this.
- Mario Heiderich obviously knows his stuff and even though it was way too technical for a few people, everybody agreed, that it was exciting. He spoke about his “Abusive Relationship with AngularJS - About the Security Adventures with the "Super-Hero" Framework”.
- Jeremy Keith was back for the third time in six years. This time he opened day two with his talk “Resilience”.
- Andrea Krajewski said “Bye, Bye Screen”.
- After asking her more than once, Indra Kupferschmid finally was part of the beyond tellerrand family also on stage and not “only” in the audience. Her talk was about “Typography on the web is just like other typography only much more interesting”.
- Chris Murphy opened the event on day one with “Time + Creativity”.
- I guess David Jonathan Ross gave a talk called “Cracking the Code”, which surprised most of the attendees as it was about typography, but more exciting for any programmer in the audience than they’d have expected. See yourself what I mean and watch the video.
- Catt Small showed, what it means, when she says she is speaking about “Designing Socially Impactful Digital Experiences”.
For the slides, I have to say, that most of the speakers say, that their slides without the talk often don’t make real sense to be published. I agree. Therefore only a few of the speaker pages have slides listed. Furthermore all slides are included in the video of the talk using a split screen technology. Makes much more sense in my opinion anyways.
Audio
Every year more and more people really understand what the fantastic Tobi Lessnow (aka Baldower) is doing at beyond tellerrand – not only does he do hand made music during the breaks, but he colorises the music with snippets of samples of the talk that just happened. He deserves all the applause he gets at the event. He once called it Sketchnotes in Music and I love it. Everything that he is going to be released will be shown here.
Don't miss the opportunity and support Tobi and his work with listening to the tracks of past events.
The Working Draft Podcast recorded Revision 263 during beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf. Their guests were PPK, Chris Heilmann and Jeremy Keith.
T-Shirts and Visual-Theme
My old buddy Björn, whom I know from looong ago when we were using our Commodore C64 instead of laptop or smartphone – nothing else was available anyways – asked me, what I think of the idea to use his ANSI art skills to theme the event, I was very happy. It certainly brings some limitations with it, due to the fact that you only can use certain resolution ratios and colours, but this limitation usually was, what made us creative in the past.
Yesterday I published a blog post by Björn with a lot of background information on the artwork and the technique used.
Again at this point: thanks to Björn for taking care and creating the visuals.
Opening Titles
This year’s opening titles have been created by Bernd Zeier. I loved his hand writing animations and asked him, if he’d to like to do the titles for Düsseldorf. He has chosen a surf-sound as title song for it and the attendees asked more than once, if that song is available somewhere and I have seen them swinging along when the titles where shown.
Therefore: well done, Bernd. And Thank you.
Update May 25: Added a short blog post interview by jambit and the photo set of Patrick Westerhoff. Also added the title song for the event by Tobi Lessnow to the coverage.
Update May 28: Added blog post by PPW.
Update May 30: Added Workingdraft Podcast, which was recorded during beyond tellerrand with PPK, Chris Heilmann and Jeremy Keith.
Update June 3: Added blog post and photos by Steffen Rademacker
Update June 7: Added blog post by Florenz Heldermann, as well as the new track by Baldower from Mr. Bingo's talk.
Update June 11: Added blog post by Jessica Lazarus (she designed four posters for her four favourite talks!!)
Update June 22: Added a blog post by Phil Shackleton
Update July 4: New set of Photos by Dirk Döring added