Christoph ZillgensBack to Home

I don’t write much on this blog, but this conference needs a few lines of praise. I’m sitting in the train back home from the great beyond tellerrand conference that took place in Düsseldorf on Monday and Tuesday and some accompanying workshops on Sunday before.

The organisator Marc Thiele, who you may know (I didn’t) from previous FFK events, did an amazing job bringing together many great speakers from all over the world, talking two full days about web design, web development, typography, content strategy, usability, accessibility and so on, covering many fields of the web. It was a great mixture of topics and everyone could find worthwhile infos in any talk. I for example am a Javascript noob, but the two speakers covering that topic, Seb Lee-Delisle and Jake Archibald, made it very funny and easy-going even for those non-programmers like me. This was exactly the “beyond tellerrand” idea, meaning to think outside the box and learn things beyond your field of expertise.

Same was true with the presentations of Steph Troeth and Stephanie Hay, talking about UX and content strategy, topics that are often not considered that much in smaller projects. They both also had some worthwhile and enlightening information for me as a designer.

The most interesting presentations for me were those of Yves Peters, Simon Collison and Jon Tan. Especially Ives Peters rocked it in the evening session on Monday with an easy going and funny talk about typography in movie posters and how Trajan is involved in it. He did the insane work of viewing through 16,000 movie posters over the past 20 years to see how often Trajan was used in it and to prove that there was no connection between Oscar-winning films and the use of Trajan in their movie posters. He also showed a little video with designer Gavin Berliner talking about floating heads on movie posters, containing the quote of the day:

You know you’ve made it, when your head’s got a little bit bigger«

I don’t want to list every talk here as it’d be too long, but all in all it was a great event with many top-class people on stage.

Many big thanks to Marc for taking the risk for organising this event. It was the first conference of this kind in Germany, bringing together well-known speakers from all over the world without having those boring Microsoft or Adobe sponsored speakers on stage and still keeping the price on a really low level. The venue was really cosy with all the little round tables with table lamps. I didn’t take any photos but you can find some on flickr.

Everyone that stayed at home for no valid reason should be worried about not have taken part! Well, as far as I know, there will be a second chance next year to attend.

Already looking forward to it!