Danny Gregory spoke at beyond tellerrand Berlin in 2016 and gave a wonderful talk about why every day matters. It was wonderful to have him being part of beyond tellerrand. Now he and Koosje Koene, who founded Sketchbook Skool together, invite people to free online drawing parties to get through these tough and strange times together. And this with drawing together.

Danny and Koosje state, that everybody can be an artist. They don’t believe in talent, but they believe that everyone is able to become an artist though teaching their way seeing. They always state that drawing and making art is powerful and yet, in these times, they might be even more right with this.

On this page they invite you to be part of their drawing parties and offer other free resources, stating that they want to ​relieve stress, connect and get creative.

Check the schedule and join in!

Gary Hustwit decided to stream one of his films for free each week. For the last week and until tomorrow his film Helvetica is available for free.

Watch Helvetica now

Many companies think of ways to support freelancers, sole workers and the creative community in general. Affinity now decided to reduce the price for their products by 50%.

Next to this they offer a new 90-day trial period for the whole product range for Mac or Windows.

They state:

• A new 90-day free trial of the Mac and Windows versions of the whole Affinity suite
• A 50% discount for those who would rather buy and keep the apps on Mac, Windows PC and iPad
• A pledge to engage more than 100 freelance creatives for work, spending the equivalent of our annual commissioning budget in the next three months (more details of this will be announced soon).

Furthermore as reason for this they say:

The introduction of the 90-day free trial and deeply discounted pricing is done in the hope that this will make life a little easier for people who rely on creative software to make a living, but may be stuck at home without their usual tools, or for students who might not have access to their Affinity apps on their personal devices.

Read the full announcement on their site.

Not much. Only wanted to state that – once more – people are overwhelmingly nice these days. I still need to get in touch with a couple of partner for the postponed beyond tellerrand event in Düsseldorf, but up to now people just bare with my and hope that I will be able to run it later this year.

Thank you so much!

As we all need to stay at home right now, you might have more time than usual (I don’t right now, it is more the opposite and I need to make plans for a possible future).

Why not using this time next to taking care of you and your family to meet online, learn, get inspired or look into new fields of business?

Yesterday I was watching a live stream of Gavin Strange and James White, as they are not able to give their talk at Offf in Barcelona, as expected. Right now, I can’t find it online, but it was a nice journey to their careers as speakers, where/how it started and simply nice to meet a few people.

Erika and Mike started something called Quarantine Book Club. The idea is to bring people together with authors. Ticket price for each session is $5. They state:

Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!

Next to this, there are a lot of talks from past events online, which you can watch. Like in our channel on YouTube. And there are plenty of more “events” online these days. For me it really is no alternative to what I do with beyond tellerrand, but maybe something in addition and a way to keep the spirit alive and stay connected without being able to meet in real life. I recently read in one of the Slacks for event organisers I am in, that one organiser was missing the live reactions to the first online meetup they ran. She said:

[…] today we did our first zoom webinar. Overall, ok (Q&A, focused video on facilitators) but huge design flaw at the end: there’s no way to create feedback from the audience. Meaning: no clapping or props. Such a huge disappointing end IMO. […]

I totally understand this. Also the interaction between people in between the talks during the breaks at live events is missing. Well, let’s hope things are better soon!

What are you doing these days?

Robert Nyman and Philip Jägenstedt teamed up with Mozilla to create a short survey to find out, which the biggest recurring problems while building websites are for web developers and designers.

⇾ Visit: MDN Browser Compatibility Survey

The goal of this site is to show you how variable fonts tick. Discover how they can benefit user interface (UI) design, accessibility, and long-form reading, and how they push the boundaries of skillful typographic expression on the web.

⇾ Visit: Variable Fonts – How to Work with Them

I get a lot of emails from people who want to speak or who suggest people to invite or people from a company who say I need to invite their CEO, Creative Director, XYZ. All fine and I am happy to actually receive those emails. But sometimes I wish people would at least re-read the email made from their template to correct at least the name of the event (or the organiser, me).

Simply looks cheap and in this case, won’t even get a reply. And I really do reply to every email.

Last Thursday I had the honour of being the guest in episode number 82 of the Presentable podcast by Jeff Veen. It was great fun to chat with him (as usual when meeting him in person). We spoke about how events and the reason to be at events might have changed over the last 20 years. In my opinion it is less about learning and getting to know how to do things, but more to broader topics, motivation and inspiration nowadays. At least when it comes how I see me running events.

I love running my events. It is just great to see all those different people with so many different interests and backgrounds coming together for two days to exchange, enlighten and inspire each other. I could have gone on forever to chat about all this, but I guess, you have to meet me at one of the events in 2020 to chat face to face ;)

But this way, please, to have a listen yourself. If you like, join the beyond tellerrand Slack and let me know about your opinion and reason, why you attend events/conferences?

I'm usually not a tomorrow person, especially not when it comes to running. But today I have been out with the dog at about 6am and thought, I go for a run, when I walked my youngest daughter to school. Also as I want to celebrate five years of Creative Mornings in Düsseldorf this evening and can’t go for my usual Friday run with my friend Andy.

Well, I took the wrong exit somewhere on the field and had to go a bit further 🙄 … 😂 also the field roads were covered with ice still and I had to be very careful where to run. ❄️

Where else:

• Strava
• Instagram