Beyond Tellerrand Berlin 2022

Beyond Tellerrand, a beloved German design and tech conference, always commissions an adventurous opening title sequence to kick the event off with a bang, and the concept for this sequence started with the music. I had unaccompanied drums in mind, something loose but energetic, evoking the bebop era of American jazz. As that composition came together, it steered me directly toward two midcentury design legends for visual inspiration: Reid Miles and Saul Bass. I’ve always loved the bold, restrained palettes of the former’s Blue Note album covers and the latter’s film titles (Vertigo specifically, in this case), with vivid figures and stark white type popping off of inky black backgrounds.

My own vivid figures were developed with Kalinoscope, an app I built to create and manipulate halftones in a variety of ways: