Extra issue: Beyond Tellerrand Berlin, 2024
Last week, I attended Beyond Tellerrand Berlin. I keep seeing and hearing that organising live events is getting harder (where did all of our company learning budgets go? and the sponsors?), which makes BTConf and our collective regular attendance all the more remarkable. Marc’s events with all the amazing speakers are between a conference and a class reunion I want to attend. Anyway, this was the intro to the sketch notes, so let’s get to it.
I linked all the speaker pages, which is where you’ll find the recordings when they become available.
Linda Liukas: A Playground Worth a Thousand Programmes
I loved Linda’s perspective and projects since I came across one of her earlier talks. Learning programming concepts with the whole body leads to a different level of understanding. Tech can seem cold and rigid, but it doesn’t have to be. I’m a little jealous of the kids who get to learn this way, and I sometimes wonder how much burnout we could avoid if we could also work with our whole body and not just a few fingers and our eyes fixed on a laptop. [Speaker page]
Jan De Coster: Never Let Go of Your Dragon
Again, tech can seem cold and rigid, but it doesn’t have to be. Faceless robots can be replaced with cute robots, fluffy robots, and robots with a strong character and vulnerabilities that make them relatable. [Speaker page]
Sophie Koonin: So You’ve Decided to Do a Technical Migration
Sophie’s talk was full of solid practical advice and highly relatable for anyone who went through a big technical migration, even if my contribution was supporting my developer colleagues with rocket and heart emojis on Slack. (But then I got to do a whole redesign! With so many new functions!) [Speaker page]
Christine Vallaure: The Beauty of Solopreneurship
Christine’s talk was a lovely example of finding a different definition of founder success for herself and what are the important elements to make it work. [Speaker page]
Jessica Hische: Crafting the Life You Want
I was very excited to see Jessica’s talk live. This might be unexpected, as I’m mostly a happy one-trick pony when it comes to lettering, and mostly for my walls (or here).
However, as a baby graphic designer in my first uni years, I kept returning to Jessica’s site for her generously shared resources on how to be a young designer with flow and joy or how to communicate well with clients. These were all things that did not come easily to me as a teen among the older students, nor did I see by our mostly old and male teachers.
This talk was a mindmap on how to keep up that joy and flow, and it was a lovely experience to see it live for this no-longer-baby designer. [Speaker page]
If you’re still reading, you might enjoy my other posts!
Miriam Suzanne: Hints and Suggestions: The Design of Web Design
Yay, a technical talk that was highly entertaining and relatable for a designer! I sometimes touch CSS, but I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing, but this talk made it look fun. [Speaker page]
Manuel Matuzović: Color in CSS Or: How I Learned to Disrespect Tennis
Well, this was the technical talk that went above my head. However, I enjoyed the curious approach to the topic and the political statement on this politically charged week. [Speaker page]
Sheryl Cababa: Thinking in Systems to Design Your Personal Design Principles
It’s always great to see a name at a conference whose book is also on my to-read list. Sheryl’s talk is close to what I think a lot about in my work, my talks, and also why I sometimes won’t sleep well. We often remember ‘global’ (well, Western) principles for good design from academia or other studies, then learn to figure out ‘local’ principles for each company, team or project; sometimes these are explicit, often not. And then comes the (sometimes tough) personal choice: do I want to be a part of this system or not? [Speaker page]
Paddy Donnelly: Stormy Seas, Shape-shifting Creatures and Picture Books
What a nice, soothing talk with seaside photos and fairy tales! And, as it turns out, it’s not unusual to coexist in UX and visual storytelling, like I’m trying to do. [Speaker page]
Hidde de Vries: Creativity Cannot Be Computed
This was a lovely closing talk: a level-headed view on how art and computing aren’t adversarial unless someone makes it so, and creativity isn’t just about the deliverables. The artist, the audience, the context, etc., are all part of something that becomes art. (This reminds me of a post I wrote on the ‘aliveness’ of images.) [Speaker page]
And that’s a wrap! If this wasn’t enough, here’s my talk from 2021 on building a different, nourishing media environment.
For the sketchnotes, I used a 0.38 Muji pen and then some colored pencils, because our grey sky and grey mood needs it. Then I scanned it, and that’s it; live events and drawings are supposed to be imperfect.
Thanks for reading! See you next year, and until then you can subscribe here, or find me on Mastodon, Bluesky or Instagram.
Julia