That Was The Week That Was – 11th May 2025
This week saw myself and Lisa head to Dusseldorf for a few days as I was speaking at Beyond Tellerrand, a wonderful design event created and run by Marc Thiele. Apparently it had been ten years since I last spoke at a Beyond Tellerrand event so I had plenty of new things to show.
One of the great things about these conferences is seeing friends I may not have seen for a while and so it was great to so many people that I used to see a lot more when I was doing a lot more public speaking. There's a real community feeling with Marc's events, all of which emanates from the care and attention Marc puts into them, such as the beautifully thought out gifts for the speaker waiting for you on arrival at the hotel.
Getting to the venue around we lunch time, we joined the queue for the burger truck, making our way down the line as we caught up with people we hadn't seen for a while. After finally getting to the front and ordering our burger – we went for the truffle version – it was then a bit longer to wait for my name to be called. Finally the shout of "Brendan" went out and as I went towards the truck, keen to taste this giant burger, I tripped over the step and crashed into the truck, charging it full on with my shoulder, so much so that the whole food truck shook and the condiments on the front fell off. The queue let out a gasp of "woooahhhh" some maybe out of concern but most probably thinking "look at that idiot!" Only my pride was hurt and I laughed it off we made our way inside to taste that burger. It was good though we all concluded that no matter type you ordered it pretty much all tasted the same.
A few hours later I was on stage, giving my talk about generative systems and how I go about making the work that I do. The audience were lovely and receptive. I think having a ten year break between talks turned out well. Before my talk Jason Parmental did a great talk about curiosity which also included mention of the Warbler typeface for the type nerds in the room. Following my talk Gavin (JamFactory) did a crazy intense talk about everything he gets up to from his role as Director at Aardman to his personal projects, including the titles he designed – and played – for the conference.
Florian Ziegler took some wonderful photos of the event, some of which are shown below.
That night we ate at a bar somewhere, though initially we were told food service had stopped at 9pm (it was now 9:10pm) but luckily one of the other speakers manage to persuade the owner to do us the German version of pizza which we were glad of. We did however have to pop across the road to get cash to pay the bill as he only accepted "German Debit Cards." Apparently that global card network works differently in Germany!
The following day Lisa and me went around the city, stopping at a nice coffee place called Bazzarr Coffee. We liked it so much we returned there the following day before heading back. On our way to the old town we got on the subway only yo realise we had no idea what stop to get off. Thankfully a couple kindly told us as they were getting off the same place too. We ended up chatting to them and it turned out the husband – Andrew – was an English artist who had lived there for over thirty years after meeting his German wife. He said I was the first English person he had spoken too for two years. We said out goodbyes and headed to first the Rhine and then the canal which runs through the center of the city.
That night seven of us went to Little Tokyo and ate at a Vietnamese place. Boa burgers and Gyoza were consumed by us all. After that we headed to the official drinks after party where we stayed for an hour or two then said our goodbyes and meandered back to the hotel with some other friends.
Our flight home the next day was in the early evening which gave us time to have a leisurely day, taking in more of the city, getting some food at the Carlsplatz market and walking in the park before getting an Uber back to the airport.
The next day was the opening of Factory Reality at the Offline gallery in New York. Unfortunately I couldn't be there but the show looked very well attended including Gary Hustwit and Natasha Dack dropping in to have a look. I really like this as a space – descending down the narrow staircase to have the cavernous space open up on to you. Mika is doing a wonderful job of curating some great shows.
The Sunday after the opening I zoomed into a panel discussion taking place at the gallery. The only thing was, the other speakers microphones had not been sent through a mixing desk into the laptop I was appearing on so I couldn't hear anything anyone was saying. I tried to carry on best I could but it was a pretty one-way conversation.
