Tilman
Professor of Digital Experience Design at the Faculty of Design, Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm
I've run this site since 1998. It's a working space for a single question: how can creative practitioners publish on the web today, on their own terms? You'll find a digital garden of evolving notes and a microblog of thoughts, findings and links.
This page is hand-written HTML and CSS. No framework, no build step, no cookies. View source.
The web is coming back
I watched the web turn from an open, creative space into a platform-dominated landscape. But the return has already started: creative people are moving back to their own websites, quietly, mostly outside the mainstream's view, with their own gatherings and a real culture of helping each other get started. Two sections of my garden document it: the movements behind it, and the personal sites worth learning from.
My research is practical: I want to show that running your own website is achievable, worthwhile, and the best way to publish creative work today. A partnership I arranged with Hetzner, one of Europe's largest data centre operators, gives students and staff at my university free hosting. Knot, an IndieWeb platform I co-built, is an attempt to make independent publishing less technical than it currently is. Every month I host the Homebrew Website Club in Nürnberg.
Running your own website is easier than the professional web makes it look. You don't need the tools and workflows of a software team. A few files you understand will do. If you're not a developer: you're in the right place, the web is for everyone.
Digital garden
From evolving notes to long-form articles. These are the ones worth your time first:
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How can creative practitioners publish on the web today?
A guided map of six ways to publish online, with their advantages, pitfalls and trade-offs. If you're thinking about showing your work online, start here. This version keeps growing; a fixed, citable version is the working paper below.
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Running your own website
The why and how of independent publishing: what is possible on the web, what gets in the way, and where to begin.
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Alternative web movements
The ideas and communities reimagining a more human web — the IndieWeb, the small web, the slow web, and more.
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Inspiring websites
Personal websites worth learning from, each a different model of an independent presence.
Last curated: September 2026 – To the Digital garden →
Microblog
Thoughts, findings and links, published irregularly
Research
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How can creative practitioners publish on the web today? Options, pitfalls, and trade-offs
Creative Web Working Papers, No. 1, September 2026, CC BY 4.0, PDF — the fixed, citable version of the evolving guide in my digital garden
A second, older strand of my work asks how design is taught, and how digital and analogue learning spaces support it. All publications →
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I watch the return to independent websites, write about it, and build tools where they're missing.
Everything I post online lives here first and is syndicated out from here, also known as POSSE. Follow the microblog feed and you get all of it. Follow me elsewhere and you get whatever that platform decides to show you:
Contact
I'm available for talks and workshops on independent web publishing, for research collaborations, interviews and press enquiries: mail@tilman.me
Download portrait JPEG, 1708 × 2136 px
Colophon
This page is hand-written HTML and CSS, served from my rented Hetzner server in Germany. The microblog posts above are pulled from a JSON feed on the server. The only JavaScript is the privacy-friendly counter, no personal data is tracked.
The microblog is running on Knot.
The digital garden runs on Obsidian Publish. Currently for me an efficient way to publish my writing, but unfortunately it renders with JavaScript. I hope I can replace that soon.