we are here. Performance at Beyond Tellerrand

This performance has been years in the making. In a sense, you could say it’s been a lifetime in the making.

On November 6th, 2025, my brother Ian and I gave a “talk” at the amazing Beyond Tellerrand conference in Berlin, Germany. In this “talk”, I didn’t speak a single word. Instead, Ian and I performed music to serve as the live soundtrack to, well, my entire life.

My life, documented.

My mom spent my entire childhood with a camcorder mounted to her shoulder. Family gatherings, youth sporting events (holy crap, so many sporting events), and moments both mundane and extraordinary, my mom documented so much of my life.

When I was in high school, my family got a VHS and DVD player/burner that had a “transfer VHS-to-DVD” function. I spent an entire summer converting every VHS tape into DVD format, storing them in a CD binder that was entombed in my childhood home for the next 20 years.

More life, more technology, more documentation

While the DVD binder remained stationary in my hometown, I went on living life. Turns out, I inherited my mom’s documentarian instincts, and throughout high school, college, and adulthood I found myself making funny videos with my friends, and capturing my lived experience through photos and videos.

Of course, as technology progressed it became easier and easier to capture these moments (aside: the only “hole” in my archives was from around 2006-2008, which was a post-point-and-shoot camera and pre-smartphone era. I had a phone with a weak camera and a memory card that has been lost to time. Facebook photos existed, but it was a pain to transfer from the phone to the computer, so my archives are slim). Technology continued to progress to “say, you wanna see 100,000 pictures of my great grandfather and everything he’s ever done?” levels.

A middle-aged man reflects on his life

In 2024 I turned 40, which makes me an Official Middle-Aged Man (depending on who you ask). Like so many, I used this milestone to reflect at the life I’ve lived so far to see what lessons I could extract.

And holy shit has there been a lot of life. A lot of good. A lot of bad. A lot of hard. Our life experiences shape how we think and act in the world. We have no choice in the matter.

I felt such a strong pull to share these reflections with more people and was on the hunt for opportunities to do so. The universe seemed to oblige when Marc reached out.

A unique opportunity at an important conference

Beyond Tellerrand is a really special conference to me. It’s where I first shared Atomic Design with the world, and changed the trajectory of my life. I’m so incredibly fortunate to have forged a close friendship with Marc over many years of conference adventures together. Marc is a uniquely amazing person, and I’ve heard him explain many times that “beyond tellerrand” translates from German to “beyond the perimeter of the plate.” So when he asked me back to speak at the conference in 2025, I knew this was an opportunity to do something special.

I’ve seen plenty of conference talks where a certain flavor of creative professional (especially graphic designers, animators, visual artists) take the audience through their career trajectory and portfolio, sharing lessons along the way. While I generally enjoy this format for learning from others, I knew that I wanted to do something different. Something unique. Something out there. Something “beyond tellerrand.”

Almost a year out from the November conference, I pitched Marc the idea. “I’ll give a talk where I don’t say a word. I’ll share a timeline of my life and play music along to it. It will culminate in a big climax at the end and get everyone in the audience to sing. It will be epic. Trust me!”

“Ehhhhhhhhhhhh, ok.” Marc is equal parts skeptical and willing to entertain my crazy shenanigans. That’s why I love him.

In the coming months, I brought the concept to life in my brain, and by the summer I realized I needed to really get to work. I dusted off the binder of DVDs only to realize I didn’t finalize the damn things over 20 years ago. Thankfully, my parents still had the VHS/DVD player, so I spent weeks chipping away at finalizing over 120 DVDs. I then hire my teenage neighbor to rip all of the DVDs and convert them to mp4 files. It’s a mundane-yet-tedious process, which ends up taking the whole summer to complete.

All the while, I worked on compiling the narrative, planning the musical motif, acquiring gear (including this crucial, amazing pedal!), and sifting through a literal lifetime’s worth of footage. Eventually, I realized I didn’t have enough time or bandwidth to do all of this, so I reached out to my pals Dusan and Dusan at Spirits Creative, who did a phenomenal job creating the intro animation for my Wake Up Excited! podcast.

Thankfully, they were willing to go down the rabbit hole with me, and they worked with me to create a visual system to represent a steady timeline to represent the entirety of my life. Turns out, the talk time slot is about 40 minutes long, and I’m 41 years old. So the math worked out where 1 minute of video representss each year of my life. Pretty wild.

Off to Germany

Like any ambitious creative project, there’s always a scramble at the date gets closer. I bought a flight case for my bass guitar (I’ve never flown with music gear before!), and Marc had people wrangle an ENTIRE FREAKING BACKLINE for all of our musical shenanigans.

Me, Ian, and our dad traveled together to Berlin. As soon as we arrived, we started playing tourist and quickly sent Dusan and Dusan some video footage to serve as one of the last nodes of the talk’s timeline. After all, this trip is part of my life’s journey and serves as an important bridge between my past and the present moment with the audience.

Ahead of the conference, we have a blast catching up with friends old and new. Ian and I conduct a full-day Advanced Design Tokens workshop, and we have a ton of fun with the attendees working through a lot of the architecture and concepts we cover in our Subatomic Design Tokens course. It was great, and the workshop made me feel better about not giving a practical talk at the actual conference.

On the day of the conference, it was go time. We got to the amazing venue, which primarily serves as an actual music venue. This is fantastic news for us as it means the sound system is amazing and the sound engineer is a seasoned veteran live sound technician.

Tobi gets the audience amped with his amazing DJ energy, Marc as always plays the gracious host, and all of the speakers give absolutely stellar performances. It’s an inspiring day, but we’re a bit distracted as we’re assembling an incredible (and incredibly high-end!) Roland electronic drum kit that was arranged for us. Ian and I get our gear set up and sound check at lunch. Shortly after, it’s show time.

Ain’t no party like an after party

Immediately after we completed our set, we scrambled to move our musical gear into another room at the venue that served as the home of our after party jam session! We encouraged people to show up ready to play music, and sure enough that’s what we did! Despite plans to put a little structure to it, everything went out the window and we ended up having an absolute blast playing anything and everything we could. Attendees and speakers alike jumped behind the instruments and mics and let ‘er rip. It was SO MUCH FUN.

we are here. we are alive.

In my life, I’ve experienced some of the best triumphs a human being can experience. I’ve also experienced some utterly awful things I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. I could articulate those experiences verbally, and it wouldn’t come close to capturing the nature of these experiences. I wanted the audience to FEEL those experiences. I wanted to take the audience on a journey. I wanted to go on that journey myself.

Above all, I wanted to bring everyone into the present moment. To be in the present moment. To celebrate the present moment. To help everyone understand that every single thing that’s happened to them in their own unique timeline has led them to the present moment. Everything that’s ever happened in your life — good, bad, and ugly — has brought you to this present moment.

We are fundamentally different organisms, and each of us have lived a truly singular life. AND YET. We are all also fundamentally the same organisms: comprised of the same atomic elements, needing the same things, and containing an infinite potential and capacity for love & creativity. we are here. we are alive.

Thank you

• Thank you Marc for trusting me to bring this crazy dream into existence at your amazing conference.
• Thank you Ian for playing music for decades, and as always for participating in these increasingly-crazy projects.
• Thank you Spirits Creative for all of your amazing animation/visual prowess, collaboration & ingenuity, and for enduring rounds of feedback and tweaking up until the 11th hour.
• Thanks to Hybrid Lab Studio for mixing our performance into something that sounds really fantastic!
• Thanks to all of the venue staff who helped arrange the gear and accommodated our uniquely weird thing.
• Thanks to Tobi for all of your energy and joining me to sing at the very end of the performance.
• Thanks to the audience for coming on this journey with me and being cool with receiving something a lot different than a web design talk.
• Thanks to Dad for traveling with us to Berlin, helping us wrangle gear and logistics, for manning the GoPro during the performance, and for all of your love and support.
• Thanks to Mom for documenting so much of my life, and for all of your love and support.
• And thanks to all of my family and friends for a lifetime of love and experience.

we are here. we are alive.