Personal notes on beyondtellerrand 2013

Wow, what a great conference! Last week I attended the new beyondtellerand conference 2013. I was so impressed by most of the speakers, the fabulous venue and again the supernice people I met.

Marc Thiele (@marcthiele) did an incredible good job in creating a really comfortable and friendly atmosphere at the main location Capitol Theater. I could write a lot about it but if you really wanna get a feeling for how polished everything was I recommend watching last years 3 minute recap at Vimeo.

Even I went to the pre-conference warm up in a brewery called “Zum Schlüssel“, I made it to the kick off talk next morning. 😉 Jeremy Keith (@adactio) took a look beyond the edge of the plate and pointed out why digital preservation and the web with it’s URLs is so necessary! Indiewebcamp, Longnow, Longbets and Zooniverse are just a few organizations already thinking in a long term scale. I found another but similar 15 minutes Jeremy Keith talk on YouTube. Watch it!

While most of the talks adressed web technologies, Kate Kiefer Lee (@katekiefer) gave us some deep insights into optimizing MailChimps company voice and how important that is. Voiceandtone.com is defenitly a must read if you run your own business or website!

Aaron Gustafson (@aarongustafson), writer of the book Adaptive Web Design introduced progressive enhancement and came up with the idea of retina image support opt out. A good one if your’re on a slow mobile connection.

First and foremost topic was web development with responsive design and the need for web designers to do most layout directly as HTML / CSS prototypes for immediate and better customer feedback on any screen size. Structure first! Photoshop files are not the right tool to define a design across all different use cases. And never design for a specific device – the web will exist longer than iPhones.

I was happy to have japanese lunch with Blain Cook (@blaine), Chris Heilmann (@codepo8) (who had a nifty Firefox OS Keon phone in his pocket) and Josh Brewer (@jbrewer), the guy who received standing ovations for his 45 minutes guitar concert. Wow!

I’ll definitely consider Harry Roberts (@csswizardry) CSS architecture, naming conventions, smacss and inuitcss/. Great help!

Atomic Design was Brad Frosts (@brad_frost) talk about HTML / CSS architecture and we laughed a lot about his introduction to pattern lab. Very entertaining!

Sadly I missed half of James Victores talk but it must have been really inspiring!

In the end just some links you and I should check: https://webmaker.org, http://blog.cloudfour.com/ and http://lanyrd.com/2013/btconf/ for the complete speaker list, videos, slides and more informations!

And don’t forget: “Always ask for more!”

[Update – collected talks]
Brad Frost – Atomic Design (on Vimeo)
Jeremy Keith – Beyond Tellerrand (on Vimeo)
Josh Brewer – Photoshop you are a liar (on Vimeo)

2 thoughts on “Personal notes on beyondtellerrand 2013”

  1. Thanks a ton for the nice feedback. Very glad you liked it. Hope to see you next year again!

    /marc

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.