This year’s once more wonderful set is up. It contains 152 black-and-white photos from beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026.

This time, I wanted to write a bit more in details about why these photos matter to me and why I think they’ll matter to anyone who was in the room with us.

A Different Kind of Event Photography

When you run an event like beyond tellerrand, you need different kinds of coverage for different purposes. There are the photos that document the event. Like the speakers, the stage, the partner, the venue and those are essential. They tell future attendees and partners what happened. I think Florian’s collection of photos is something else entirely every time. He documents the conference the way you’d remember it if you’d been there. Not as a programme of talks, but as a feeling of being among these people for two days and with a glimpse behind the curtain.

Look through the 2026 gallery and you’ll notice how few of the frames are the obvious shot. Yes, the speakers are there, but Florian seems much more interested in the audience than the stage. He photographs the room watching. Faces lit by laptop screens. A hand on a knee. The geometry of seat-backs receding into the dark. Hugs in the foyer. Someone laughing mid-sentence at the coffee machine. Someone alone for a second in a corridor, just thinking.

Some of his frames are more like paintings than reportage. He gets angles and views that are not typical. They provoke emotions and bring back memories I didn’t even know I was making at the time. ;)

How He Works and Florian’s Style

What I’ve always been impressed by and said this in the post I wrote for the 2024 photos is how unobtrusive he is. He’s been part of the beyond tellerrand family for so long that it genuinely feels like he’s always been there, even though my records say his first set is from 2018. I never see him taking the photos. I just get them later, and think: when on earth did he shoot all of these?

For people who don’t know Florian: by his own description, he’s “a dad of two daughters and husband, web designer and developer by trade and photographer at heart”. He runs a web agency called Haptiq with his friend Claudio. His photographic life, though, is the one he talks about most warmly. He posts almost daily on florian.photo, publishes zines and printed books each year, and documents conferences he actually wants to attend.

Almost everything he publishes is in black and white. It’s not a stylistic affectation it’s how he sees. He has written that colour is a distraction from the things monochrome forces you to look at: light, shape, gesture, the fall of shadow across a face. His selection process for a final gallery is “brutal”. He’s said that the last ten photos he cuts have to really hurt to delete; only then does he know he’s down to the keepers. You can feel that ruthlessness in the gallery, as there’s nothing here that’s just there to fill space.

What This Set Captures

A few things stand out to me when I look through the 2026 selection. The portraits are unposed and conversational, shot at the distance of a friend rather than a press photographer. This makes sense, because at this point Florian is a friend to most of the people in the frame and certainly to me. The wider shots use the venue’s architecture deliberately: dark balconies, bright stages, silhouettes of heads in rows. And there’s a move he keeps coming back to, where the subject is small in the frame and the surrounding space does most of the emotional work. It’s a generous way to photograph a conference, because it gives the event a body, not just its speakers.

If you’re looking for the bright, pin-sharp press shot of a speaker mid-gesture, this isn’t quite that gallery. It’s the slower, more atmospheric companion to the official record the version of the conference you’d remember if you’d been there. And that, for me and without devaluating what other photographers of an event do, is the highly valuable archive every single year.

Thank You!

Thank you, Florian. For this set and for all the ones before it. You’ve helped me – no, everybody – to remember beyond tellerrand for years now, and I hope you’ll keep doing it for many more.

Two days. One stage. A room full of people who showed up open, curious and kind. Fifteen years of beyond tellerrand. I am still letting that one sink in.

When I started this in 2010, I had no roadmap. I just wanted to bring people together for two days and see what would happen. Somehow, against the odds and across more than a few difficult years for community events, we are still here. Looking out from the back of the room this week, watching conversations spill from the seats into the lobby and out onto the street, I had the same feeling I have had every year since: this is exactly what I hoped it would be and what I wanted to do.

What Happened on Stage

The line-up this year was a wide one – on purpose. From Annie Atkins and the invisible craft of film props, to Marjan van Aubel asking why solar energy has to look like solar energy, to André Michelle reminding us why curiosity matters more than permission. Niels Leenheer brought CSS flamethrowers and oscilloscopes (and yes, we did check the fire extinguishers). Lauren Celenza asked how we stay human in the age of AI. Oliver Reichenstein did what he does best.

Different topics. Different worlds. But there was a thread running through all of them, and Sasha Maximova put her finger on it on LinkedIn:

Not speakers, makers. Not to teach how, but to show what they are making.

That, to me, is the thing. That has always been the thing. beyond tellerrand is not a conference about a topic. It is a gathering of people who make things and care deeply about what they make and who are willing to share that with the rest of us.

What I Have Been Reading

I have spent the morning reading what attendees have written online and I am not going to lie when I say, it got to me. A few moments stayed with me:

This year’s beyond tellerrand gave me exactly that glimpse of warmth at a time when everything around me felt a bit dark. – Kitty Huang

The room feels like a mix of design lab, class reunion and very well-curated creative loss of control. Nothing about it feels ironed flat. That is exactly why it feels so alive. – Frank Schmidt

It was never primarily about design or technology – it was always about people. – Simon Praetorius

They were more grounded, not hyped. I didn’t have a single second to realise what was happening between the talks. – Tomáš Hejč

That last one captures something I have been chasing for fifteen years: a programme paced so the breaks matter as much as the talks. A “playlist”, as Frank put it, rather than a schedule. Thanks to all of you who took the time to write about your experience. It means a lot to me.

Thank You

To every speaker who stood on that stage this week. Thank you for showing up the way you did. For being honest, for being human, for trusting us with your work in progress.

To the partners who made this possible in a time where partner support is anything but a given. mittwald, TYPO3, StickerApp, Kirby, Adobe and everyone else listed on the partners page – thank you. A traditional, independent event surviving and thriving in 2026 takes real conviction from the people backing it. I do not take that for granted.

To Holger at Illhill, printing t-shirts as he has done for years now. To the Tobi who turned every talk into a musical follow-up. To the Capitol Theater team and the cleaners who made the venue shine each morning. To the volunteers who make sure everything runs. To Lars and Friederike from KomKuK for that unforgettable cake. It is appreciated more than you know.

And to you, reading this. Whether you were there in the room or following along from afar: thank you. The atmosphere everyone keeps talking about is not something I make. It is something you bring. I just provide the space and time to let it happen.

What’s Next

Talks will go up on YouTube over the coming weeks. Photos, write-ups and podcast episodes will follow here on the blog. If you want to stay close to all of that, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Discord, or follow us on Bluesky and Mastodon.

For now, I am going to close my laptop, hug my family and probably sleep for about a week.

To the next fifteen years.

Stay curious.

Niels has been a beyond tellerrand attendee for more than ten years. We have crossed paths at many events over the years and I always enjoy seeing him. So when I announced him as a speaker, I was genuinely moved by what he wrote about it

beyond tellerrand is my favorite conference and I’ve been an attendee for more than 10 years. This year is the 15th edition and I am so honoured to be on the stage that inspired me so much all of these years.

That means a lot. It really does.

This is the 15th edition of beyond tellerrand, and having someone like Niels, someone who has been part of this community from early on, step up onto that stage feels like exactly the kind of moment worth celebrating.

A Browser Geek from the Start

Niels is based in Groningen, the Netherlands and a self-professed browser geek. That obsession started the moment someone showed him the original Nexus browser on a NeXT Cube, back when the internet was still very much finding its feet.

He is the creator of HTML5test.com, which became a go-to resource for understanding what browsers could actually do and he built WhichBrowser, a widely used browser detection library. He ran one of the largest Open Device Labs in the world, is a Google Developer Expert, and is an active member of the Fronteers Conference committee.

For his day job he is CTO of Salonhub, where he builds web applications for hair salons. It is, by some margin, the most sensible thing on his CV. ;)

Where the Web Gets Weird

What really sets Niels apart in my opinion is what he gets up to outside of “work”. He is currently deep in an obsession with connecting the web to physical devices and that has led to some wonderfully unhinged results.

He has used the Web Audio API to draw SVG images on a vintage 1980s oscilloscope. He blew up that same oscilloscope during one experiment. He built a CSS-controlled flamethrower. He ported the offline Chrome dinosaur game to a laser projector. None of these were accidents. All of them were pretty much on purpose.

What is remarkable is that none of this requires exotic tools or obscure hacks. It is all modern web standards, pushed into places they were probably never intended to go.

He says, he has been working on this talk for at least a year. He promises chaotic energy and lots of weird and wonderful web experiments. I believe him entirely. 😁

His talk: The Web Beyond the Edges of the Browser Window

Join Niels on a journey to the weird and wonderful fringes of the web. Way beyond anything that fits inside a browser window. From using audio to draw SVG images on 1980s oscilloscopes to a CSS-controlled flamethrower (well maybe not on stage this time …): this is a tour of the web like you have never seen it before. Ever seen a JavaScript clock that stubbornly refuses to tell the right time for example? Chrome's offline dinosaur game, beamed onto a laser projector. What does all this have in common? They are all gloriously out there, they all run on modern web standards, and Niels had an an absolute blast building them.

I cannot wait to finally see Niels on the beyond tellerrand stage. We should probably check the fire extinguishers beforehand.

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I surely have been following Bramus’s work for a while. His name popped up whenever something genuinely exciting lands in CSS. But let me introduce him to you, in case you don’t know him.

A Love Affair with the Web since 1997

Bramus is a web developer from Belgium who discovered view-source at the age of 14. That was 1997. Nearly thirty years later, the curiosity sparked by peeking behind a webpage hasn’t gone anywhere. His blog, bram.us, has been running since 2001. It is a technical, geeky weblog that is very much a living record of someone who never stopped tinkering.

Before joining Google, he worked as a freelance developer across frontend and backend roles and spent seven years as a College Lecturer in Web & Mobile, teaching undergrad students HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Inside the Platform

Today Bramus is part of the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google, where he focuses on CSS, Web UI, and DevTools. But his role goes further than that. He is one of the driving forces behind View Transitions, Scroll-Driven Animations, Anchor Positioning, and CSS Custom Functions and he is a member of the CSS Working Group.

His role in Developer Relations is essentially that of a translator. He collects the needs of web developers, gathered from surveys and conferences, back to the Chrome engineering teams. That kind of bridge work is harder and rarer these days.

He builds demos, writes deep-dive articles, speaks at conferences around the world, and just this week published the view-transitions-toolkit, a package of utility functions he has been distilling from years of practical work with the API.

When he’s not doing any of that, he goes scuba diving. In 2017 he became a certified PADI Divemaster.

His Talk “Supercharge Web UX with View Transitions”

Clunky page loads and jarring navigation are a thing of the past. Bramus will show you how the View Transitions API brings smooth, native-app-like experiences to both single- and multi-page web apps by using the CSS and JavaScript you already know. Whether you are new to the API or have been experimenting with it for a while, this is a talk worth being in the room for.

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I directly thought that this combination is rare and it is exactly the kind of thing that belongs on the beyond tellerrand stage. It took a while, but now I am super excited that Marjan van Aubel joins the 15th anniversary edition of beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf.

So who is Marjan van Aubel?

Marjan is a Dutch solar designer. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy before completing her MA in Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. From there, she built a studio and a practice that has been asking a single, urgent question ever since: why does solar energy have to be ugly?

The standard answer – silicon panels on rooftops, vast industrial farms in distant fields – treats solar as infrastructure. Useful, but separate from daily life, separate from beauty, separate from the objects we actually live with.

Marjan’s answer is different. Every surface is an opportunity. Every object we make could be harvesting light. The question is whether we have the motivation and the imagination, to design it that way.

The Current Table (2014) has a warm solar surface that collects diffuse light and lets you charge devices via USB. Current Window (2015) uses dye-sensitised solar cells in coloured glass. A modern stained glass window that generates electricity. Sunne is a self-powered solar light designed to hang in front of a window. It collects energy during the day and emits light at night. It won Dezeen’s Lighting Design of the Year in 2021 and Wallpaper’s Life Enhancer of the Year in 2022. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the V&A in London, the Vitra Design Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

She designed the solar roof of the Dutch Pavilion at the Dubai World Expo. It is made of transparent organic photovoltaic cells that form skylights, harvest energy, and can be disassembled and reused. She co-founded the Solar Biennale and The Solar Movement. In 2022 she published Solar Futures: How to Design a Post-Fossil World with the Sun. A book that looks at the past, present, and possibilities of solar energy through the lens of design.

Design as Argument

What strikes me most about Marjan’s work is that it is making an argument through objects. Not through a manifesto, not through data, not through guilt. Through things that are genuinely desirable. Things you would want to live with, even if you had no particular interest in energy transition.

In my personal opinion that is the solution for a lot of things in technology and software, to be honest and it is a much harder thing to do than it sounds. Most attempts to make sustainability beautiful end up as compromise, aren’t they? Either the design is softened until the message disappears or the message is foregrounded until the design becomes didactic. I think Marjan manages to hold both. The beauty is the argument. The objects do not represent a better future, they show how a better future looks and feels like ;)

Why You Should Be Excited

I am always trying to bring people who think across disciplines together. Between design and technology, between craft and culture, between what we make and what it means even. Marjan does this very well, but with an urgency and a poetic that I think will resonate with the beyond tellerrand audience.

She talks about a positive future. Not naively, she knows the scale of what needs to change, but with genuine conviction that design has a role to play and that the role is not just to signal values but to materialise them.

As you can see from what and how much I have writte: I am excited and maybe I made you excited also with this blog psot. Don’t miss out!

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The brief is simple: Create one original sticker design that captures what drives you. Bold, minimal, weird, experimental – whatever feels like you.

Seven selected designs will be printed and included in this year’s beyond tellerrand sticker pack, and those seven artists each get €200 in StickerApp print credit plus 10 packs to do with as they please.

Oh, and here is the part I really like: everyone who submits a valid design gets €20 in StickerApp credit. No participation trophy energy, just a genuinely nice thing to do. ;)

Submit your design as a high-res PDF, PNG or vector file, name it with your @handle, and get it in before April 9th. That’s it.

Full information and form to send in your design can be found here.

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In case you wonder: nope, neither StickerApp nor beyond tellerrand will use any of your designs or ideas for a later project. It is all yours, should be yours and will not be used in any other way than maybe writing about it afterwards.

Since then, his work has kept expanding in ways that feel surprising and entirely logical at the same time. I’m genuinely glad to have him back.

So who is Oliver Reichenstein?

Oliver studied philosophy in Basel and Paris before becoming a designer. The latter is kind of engine of everything he does, in my opinion. He founded iA (Information Architects) in Tokyo in 2005, a studio now with offices in Zurich and Tokyo (and roots in Berlin), that has become quietly influential far beyond its size.

Most people in our community know iA through their tools. iA Writer arrived in 2010 and immediately stood out: a focused, distraction-free writing environment that took the idea of clarity seriously, not as a feature, but as a philosophy. iA Writer is the only tool (maybe next to Mail), that is constantly open on my computers, as I use it for nearly everything I do – in fact, the words you read are written in it also ;) iA Presenter followed. A text-based presentation tool that asks you to think before you slide. Both are built around the same conviction: that good tools should get out of your way.

In 2024, iA launched something that surprised a lot of people: the iA Notebook. A physical paper notebook. Not a gimmick. A product developed over ten years, built around a single idea: watermark lines that guide your pen when the page is blank and quietly disappear as your words take over. Last year it won the Red Dot Best of the Best award, a distinction shared by products like the original iPhone and the first Apple Watch, for example. It’s the first paper notebook to ever receive it, as far as I know.

Philosophy Meets Practice

What makes Oliver particularly interesting to me is that he has never been content to stay inside the boundaries of what designers are expected to think about. He connects dots. He asks why things are the way they are. He draws on Giambattista Vico’s principle of Maker’s Knowledge and information theory and interface behaviour in the same breath, and somehow makes it feel natural rather than academic.

In a time when the design conversation is dominated by AI hype and product velocity, his perspective – careful, rigorous, deeply human – feels more necessary than ever, right?

Why You Should be Excited

beyond tellerrand has always been the place where people who care about craft and people who care about ideas meet in the same room. Oliver is the kind of speaker who brings both at once.

So don’t miss out and be one of the people that will be sitting still, listening to him talking ;)

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I should say: I’ve known André for a long time. We go back to the Flashforum days, when both of us were still working with Flash (remember?). He spoke at some of our Flashforum conferences and we crossed paths at countless events through the 2000s. So welcoming him to the beyond tellerrand stage feels less like an announcement and more like something that was long overdue.

André started out as a techno DJ in the 90s – earning just enough to cover rent and food, he says – and taught himself to code out of pure necessity and curiosity. That combination of musical passion and technical self-teaching turned into something remarkable.

From the Dance Floor to the Browser

In 2007, André created audiotool.com, one of the very first online music studios. For 16 years, he shaped and developed it into a platform where hundreds of thousands of people made music together in the browser. No download required. Just open it and create.

That idea, that music-making tools should be open, accessible, and free, has been the theme of everything he has done. And when he left Audiotool in 2023, he didn't stop. He started again. From scratch.

openDAW: The Browser as a Music Studio

Today André is building openDAW, an open-source digital audio workstation that runs entirely in the browser. No login. No subscription. No payment. Works on any device, including a school computer.

The idea goes back to a promise he made himself in the mid-90s: if I ever had the means, I'd build free music studios for people who have the passion but not the budget. That promise is now code.

openDAW is still growing – with a modular device system, real-time collaboration, and what André calls “discoverable toys”, which are non-classical approaches to sequencing and sound that invite experimentation rather than demanding expertise.

Why André Fits to beyond tellerrand

What I love about André’s story is that it is not really a story about technology. It’s a story about access and belief. About the conviction that creativity shouldn’t be gated behind expensive hardware, proprietary software, or the right studio in the right city.

That’s something that resonates deeply with what beyond tellerrand is about. I think (and I hope I am right) beyond tellerrand is an event for people who care about their craft, but also about why they do what they do. André cares deeply. And he has the receipts: three decades of work to prove it.

Don’t miss out and join me watching André speak.

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So far we haven’t met in person and all conversation has happened over video calls so far. This feels a little funny in hindsight, because Lauren is someone who thinks very carefully about what technology does to human connection. But even through a screen, it was immediately clear that she is exactly the kind of person I want on the beyond tellerrand stage.

So who is Lauren Celenza?

Lauren is a software designer, writer, and advocate for technology that preserves human agency. Based in Seattle, she has led design work at some of the most consequential places in the industry, but in ways that most designers rarely get to experience.

At Google Maps, she led a global team making navigation more inclusive for hundreds of millions of people. At Code for America, her work helped generate over $90 million in tax refunds for people in the US who needed them most. At the World Resources Institute, she worked on global land restoration technology. These are not small projects. These are complex, deeply human systems – and Lauren's role in all of them was to take the intricate and the overwhelming and turn it into something that actually works for real people.

She has also worked with Adobe, the Gates Foundation, and others, and has taught design and storytelling to tech makers in over 40 countries. Her work and writing have been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, and The New York Times.

Tech Without Losing Your Soul

Alongside her design practice, Lauren writes Tech Without Losing Your Soul, a newsletter and interview series that blends personal essay and sharp reporting to examine tech’s power, burnout culture, and what it actually means to build with AI without surrendering our humanity or our sense of reality.

In a world that’s full of opinions about AI and the future of work, Lauren is one of the rare voices asking the more uncomfortable questions first. Not just what can we build?, but what should we build, and what does it cost us when we don't ask that?

She has been an early member of the Alphabet Workers Union, petitioned for the Silenced No More Act in Washington State, and continues to advocate, loudly and clearly, for technology that keeps people at its centre.

Why You Should be Excited

Honestly? Because this is exactly the kind of perspective that exciting.

beyond tellerrand always has been a place where technology and humanity meet. Where people who care about craft and people who care about impact can sit in the same room and feel equally at home. Lauren embodies that wonderfully. She doesn’t separate the human from the technical. For her, they are the same conversation.

I’m really looking forward to finally meeting her in person in Düsseldorf. And I hope and think her talk is going to be one that stays with people.

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What makes this even more special for me is that Chip was with us back in 2015 in Berlin, and that talk left a real impression. The wit, the warmth, the depth of thinking behind what can so easily be dismissed as “just book covers”.

A Man Who Changed How We See Books

If you’ve ever picked up a novel and thought, wow, that cover is something else, there is a reasonable chance Chip had something to do with it.

Since joining Alfred A. Knopf straight out of Penn State in 1986, Chip Kidd has designed covers for some of the most significant books of the last four decades. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Donna Tartt, David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman. And yes, that T-rex skeleton you know from Jurassic Park. The one that became one of the most recognised icons of the 1990s, carried into the film and the entire franchise – that’s Chip’s work too.

Time Out New York once wrote that “the history of book design can be split into two eras: before graphic designer Chip Kidd and after”. That says it all, doesn’t it?

He’s currently vice president and art director at Knopf, and editor-at-large for graphic novels at Pantheon. He has designed well over 2000 covers across his career, which meansaround 75 a year! Chip has won five Eisner Awards, the 2014 AIGA Medal, and the 2007 American National Design Award and his TED Talk on book design has been viewed nearly three million times!

More Than Covers

What I love about Chip is that he refuses to let his work be reduced to its surface. Yes, the covers are iconic, but he’s also a novelist, an editor, an author of design books, a passionate advocate for comics and graphic storytelling, and genuinely one of the funniest people you’ll encounter at an event.

He doesn’t have a signature look – deliberately so. His philosophy is that every book deserves to be seen and understood on its own terms. The cover is a conversation with the content, not a brand stamp applied from the outside.

The Batman Obsession

There is another side to Chip that is just as important to understand, I think: he is, by his own admission, a total “Batmaniac”.

It started with the 1966 Batman TV show – his “gateway drug”, as he puts it – and never really stopped. He became one of the world’s leading experts on the character, authored Batman: Death by Design, helped bring the rare Japanese Bat-Manga! to Western audiences, and has contributed extensively to the Batman comics universe.

But the project that perhaps shows both his passion and his generosity best is Batman Black and White. When DC Comics commissioned him in 2013 to write a story for their Batman: Black and White anthology, the issue came with a blank variant cover. Chip saw an opportunity. He started inviting some of the most extraordinary illustrators, cartoonists, and artists in the world to each draw their own version of Batman on one of those covers. No brief, no rules, just Batman in black and white. The results were breathtaking. Contributors ranged from Eisner Award winners and New Yorker cartoonists to Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. I don’t know how many covers exist of it, but when showing me videos of it, I was absolutely impressed and would get that easily 150 covers eventually came together into an exhibition that travelled across the US, with proceeds going to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, as far as I know.

Why You Need to Be There

Whether you work with books or not, Chip’s perspective on communication, storytelling, and visual problem-solving will resonate. He talks about design the way designers wish they could: honestly, with humour, and without pretension.

Having him back in the beyond tellerrand family after Berlin 2015 is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. If you meet him in Düsseldorf, I think you will feel the same way ;)

Oh, and if you take the chance to speak to him, really ask him about his “Batman Black and White” project.

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