beyond tellerrand – Düsseldorf 2024

Chris is a designer and writer, she develops ideas with text and expresses them in letterforms. Chris specialises in lettering because she loves language and letterforms equally and couldn’t make up her mind between writing and designing. Working at the intersection of text and image, art and design, Chris creates experimental lettering that is both expressive and thoughtful. Her guiding question: „Does it have to be this way?“ For clients she designs book covers, illustrations, logos and murals and she is happy to be one of the chosen few who design stamps for the Federal Republic of Germany. After studying Illustration in Hamburg and Paris, Chris was a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S. and got her M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She wrote several books on letter design and shares her knowledge in workshops and as a speaker.

Say Something!
For the last ten years Chris specialised in lettering. But even though she works with text and draws letters every day, until very recently, she didn’t actually say anything. In this talk Chris will trace her transition from a designer who draws what her clients ask her to draw, to an artist who write her own texts and initiates her own projects. She’ll consider why it is so hard for some of us to say anything at all, what her grandma’s reaction to her coming out has to do with it, and what finally got her to speak up.

David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias, creator and host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, and a twenty-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He has presented at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, An Event Apart, LavaCon, UX Copenhagen, Artifact, IA Conference, IxDA, Design and Content Conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and the Wharton Web Conference on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.

No, Seriously, Fuck Engagement: Building a More Human Web
MLK said, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society.” As practitioners, what is our role in that shift? We’ll explore that question by looking at how “thing-oriented” design differs from “person-oriented” design. How might engagement, or our definition of it, perpetuate the very systems of oppression we dreamed the web might end? What if entering into a dialogue with Indigenous design could allow us to imagine a web that cares about people more than it cares about money? These are big swings, but it’s about time we took them.

Sophie Tahran is the Director of Content Design at Condé Nast. After establishing the discipline at The New Yorker, she built out and now leads a team of content designers across Vogue, GQ, Architectural Digest, Bon Appetit, and more publications.

Designing with Words: Content Design at The New Yorker
You’ve done the research. Presented prototypes. Triple checked your color contrast. Everything’s coming together, until someone tries to create an account using the new site. “ERROR 8854! Operation Failed,” the field shouts, with no hint of a potential solution. Content design communicates what visuals cannot, adding clarity, credibility, and consistency. In this talk, Sophie will discuss ways to think strategically about the words in your designs, from onboarding flows to error messages, using real-life examples from The New Yorker. You’ll learn what makes great writing great—and ultimately, how to design words that create a seamless experience.

David de Léon is a designer and researcher with 25 years of academic and industry experience. You can tell by his hair and beard that he has been doing it for a while At the start of his career, David worked a decade for Sony Mobile with user research and design and innovation of mobile phone interfaces. Towards the end of his tenure at Sony, he reviewed all the design output produced by the UX teams in Sweden, Japan and China. It was then that he became obsessed with the factors that contribute to effective and impactful feedback. That obsession resulted in a pack of cards of design critique questions, which is now also a website. Since people sometimes misunderstood the use of those questions – and missed out on some powerful subtleties – David wrote a book on design feedback, which may (or may not) be published by the day of the conference (the last 10% of any project are often the hardest). David lives in the south of Sweden, where makes his way through the world as a freelancing designer, researcher and design strategist. When not working, he reads obsessively, performs magic, plays with his wife, chats with his kids, and naps on the sofa.

The Gentle Art of Design Feedback
One of the surest and cheapest ways to quickly improve a piece of design is to get some feedback. The difference that good and actionable feedback can make is extraordinary. And yet, we so rarely engage in design feedback. In fact, it is probably the most underused and under-appreciated design tool that we have. Why is that? The answer may be simple. If you do design feedback poorly, it feels like wasted time, where people are unsure what to say, and feel awkward saying it. We have all suffered through meetings where people give you unfounded onions, which is frustrating, or nod their heads in approval, which is nice but doesn’t really help you to improve your work. The barriers to effective feedback are practical and psychological. There is a lack of processes and techniques, and people feel apprehensive about both giving and receiving feedback. When something is unclear and unpleasant, we avoid it. In this talk, David will focus on the psychological barriers to good design feedback. He will share practical advice, as well as some Jedi mind tricks, for how to enjoy having your design critiqued, and how to critique other people’s design without anyone feeling uncomfortable.

Stefan Sagmeister has designed for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, and the Guggenheim Museum. He’s a two time Grammies winner and also earned practically every important international design award. Stefan talks about the large subjects of our lives like happiness or beauty, how they connect to design and what that actually means to our everyday lives. He spoke 5 times at the official TED, making him one of the three most frequently invited TED speakers. His books sell in the hundreds of thousands and his exhibitions have been mounted in museums around the world. His exhibit “The Happy Show” attracted way over half a million visitors worldwide and became the most visited graphic design show in history. A native of Austria, he received his MFA from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York.

Now is Better
Stefan Sagmeister looks at the world from a long-term perspective and presents visualisations that arrive at very different conclusions than you get from Twitter and TV news.

Maggie is a designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer. She currently leads design at Elicit, an AI research lab exploring how language models can support scientific research and open-ended reasoning. She’s enthusiastic about tools for thought, end-user programming, and digital gardening.

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
The web is becoming an eerily lifeless place. Its public spaces are filled with a mix of bad faith actors and automated predators like bots, advertisers, clickbait attention-grabbers, and angry twitter mobs. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures are quietly hiding out of sight. Generative AI systems are about to make this situation worse. We now have tools that can churn out tens of thousands of words, images, and videos in seconds. The volume of mundane, low-quality, and uninspired content published to the web is about to explode. How will we find original insights under this pile of cruft? How will we figure out which authors are flesh-and-blood humans we can form emotional and intellectual relationships with? And does it even matter if something was made by an AI instead of a human?

Oliver Schöndorfer is a renowned typography expert and freelance UI & app designer from Austria. He is obsessed with everything type, feels physical pain when spotting bad kerning, and even had to switched banks, because he could not stand an updated logotype. His vision is to make digital projects more successful and beautiful through type. To share his knowledge, Oliver hosts the popular YouTube channel Pimp my Type, runs the weekly Font Friday Newsletter, writes articles, speaks at conferences and podcast. His energetic, unique style sets Oliver apart, while motivating thousands of designers and developers to leverage the power of typography. When Oliver is not thinking about letters, he practices Yoga daily, enjoys hiking with his wife Birgit, takes care of their three girls, and manually grinds coffee to keep it all going.

Typographer vs. Accessibility
Designing for accessibility sucks 😩! It is limiting creative expression, making things look ugly, and is mostly for the blind anyway. But is that really true? How can sublime typography and accessibility go hand in hand? In this talk, Oliver confronts himself with his own misconceptions as a designer and type nerd. Is 16 px the required minimum font size? Is high contrast necessary? Should you really avoid serif typefaces? And is Comic Sans best for dyslexic readers (while being the worst for everyone else)? In a fun, engaging session, Oliver takes an often overwhelming and fuzzy topic for creatives and breaks it down. You will walk away inspired 🤩 with practical guidelines on how you can set the text of your next design project beautifully accessible, to reach and convince more people.

Adrienne is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, author of the best-selling book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who's reached over 65,000 learners with her courses (a number she'll likely surpass when you read this). She is writing Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews, a labor of love that she hopes will improve code reviews everywhere. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II.

Looks GREAT To Me: Getting Past Bare Minimum Code Reviews
Ah code reviews. We need them, but we dread them. We do them, but not well. How do we deal with gigantic PRs? Why can't we write effective code review comments? How do we make code reviews shorter? Is SSDaaRB (Single Senior Developer as a Reviewer Bottleneck) something we just have to accept? In this talk, I'll not only answer these questions, but give you actionable advice on how to improve your code review today!

Natalya is a designer, developer, artist, author, educator, and doer of good deeds. She leads a team of talented designers and coders working on Primer, GitHub’s open-source design system. Previously, she worked at The New York Times, contributing to various projects from experimental apps to the main core home page. Additionally, she taught at Harvard Extension, where she created a course on Modular Design Patterns with React. She loves to write, publishing the Design Engineering Handbook and articles for various online publications. When not attending or speaking at conferences, she loves sketchnoting them with watercolours and ink. Natalya holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Psychology, and a master's in Creativity and Talent Development. Crossing disciplines and building bridges between design and engineering is at the foundation of much of her work, and building teams and creating at scale is the next big adventure.

Channeling Chaos: Role of the Artist in the Age of AI
In this pivotal moment dubbed “the age of AI,”what can the future be? What can this technology do? Who will be impacted, and how? In my role as director of Primer Design at GitHub, I am no stranger to these questions, and I find myself using my training as an artist every single day. In unprecedented times, being an artist often feels like a supernatural power. Art and technology have been deeply intertwined for most of human history, and creative minds have played the key role of embracing technology and using it to shape the future. Modern times are no exception. Whether you’re an engineer writing code, designing in Figma, or shaping product strategy, this talk is for you. Forget the paintbrush, artistic practice is not tied to a single medium. Thinking like an artist means questioning everything, being a catalyst, shaping perception, and driving innovation. In this talk I weave together stories from history with hard earned personal lessons to share artistic practices that can help anyone better navigate moments of rapid change. Most importantly, I’m not here to squeeze any more productivity out of you, introduce any clever AI hacks, or promise that I have all of the answers. As creatives in tech, we are as well positioned to shape the future as we are vulnerable to it. Embrace your inner artist and know that the future can be anything.

Michael is the founder of NWMS GmbH, consultant, keynote speaker and co-host of the podcast “On the Way to New Work” for over 6 years. After studying business administration and completing a PhD in ecology-orientated marketing, he started his career at Bossard Consultants and held positions as Managing Director at Springer & Jacoby and Global CMO at Audi. In 2004, together with André Kemper, he founded the advertising agency kempertrautmann, which became thjnk AG. Michael is also co-founder of Hyrox, the world's first fitness competition for everyone. He has received numerous awards for his work, such as, Top 40 under 40 in European Marketing, Global Newcomer Agency of the Year, “Man of the Year” (horizont) and LinkedIn Top Voice. In the more than 400 episodes of his podcast, he has spoken with business leaders, innovative thinkers and scientists (including Harvard, Stanford, INSED, St. Gallen) about the future of work. Of course, he is also co-author of the book “On the Way to New Work”, which was published in 2022 and became a bestseller.

On the Way to New Work – 7 Stories from a Journey That Has Only Just Begun
Michael has been on a journey for more than 7 years. What began as the development of a new office for thjnk, the advertising agency he founded, is now his mission. How can we make people strong and not sick through work? What can we do as individuals, as a team and/or organisation and as a society to change not only how and from where we work, but also what issues and challenges we work on? In over 420 podcast episodes and a book, Michael, together with his companions Swantje Allmers and Christoph Magnussen, reports on people who are also on the path to a better way of working. In a mixture of presentation, reading and conversation, he takes us with him on this journey

Ferdinand Ulrich is a typographer and a type history researcher living and working in Berlin. He designs publications on architecture, art and design, and spends much time writing about type for book projects, magazines and type foundries. Aside from several letter-related interests, his main research focus lies in the transitional periods of changing type design technologies and tools in the twentieth century, particularly during the early digital period (pre PostScript) — his dissertation on the subject earned him a PhD from the University of Reading in 2023. For several years Ferdinand taught graphic design, typography and some type design at Burg Halle and at UdK Berlin; he is currently a visiting lecturer in Salzburg, where he enjoys the hospitality, landscape and Schnitzel.

Digital Type, Pre-PostScript
In a common narrative of the canonical history of type manufacturing and typography, 500 years of printing from movable metal type end with the rise of commercial photocomposition in the 1950s and from there leap forward to digital PostScript fonts on the Macintosh in 1984. This narrative overlooks two decades of highly significant investigation and discourse in early digital type design technologies. Based on PhD research at the University of Reading, this talk explores that period of transition and rapid change, reviewing so-called ‘digital type design systems’ that could encode letterforms using numerical description, and explores the environment of an emerging community that first discovered and negotiated the challenging issues of digital type.

Laura Kalbag is a British designer living in Ireland and has worked in tech for over 15 years doing UX and content design, front-end development, and technical writing. She wrote the book Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart and is co-founder of Small Technology Foundation. Small Technology Foundation is a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation that works on initiatives to build and advocate for small technology that respects our rights.

Small Technology: Building Tech That Respects Our Rights
The technology we use tracks and captures our every move, habit, and facial expression. We’ve been taught surveillance is the only way we can create modern technology, and that our personal information is merely used to improve our experiences. Instead, we see data about us being used to perpetuate systems of oppression and discrimination. Being creators who are also users, we also have to reckon with how we both contribute to this surveillance system and are exploited by it. We can do better. In this talk, we’ll explore a few practical ways to design technology that prioritises human welfare. And how we can use whatever power we have to build towards a better future.