Beyond X: Graphic Recording at La Ciudad de las Ideas
What does it mean to be an event illustrator creating 40+ posters and portraits for the world’s top presenters?
La Ciudad de las Ideas — translated as "The City of Ideas" — was an international Festival of Brilliant Minds held annually in Puebla, Mexico from 2007 to the early 2020s. Part conference, part cultural celebration, it brought together students, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and thinkers from around the world in one of Mexico's most vibrant cities — a metropolis of six million people drawing on the creative and entrepreneurial energy of near Mexico City.
The festival was founded by curator and public intellectual Andrés Roemer and co-founder Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego, one of Mexico's leading entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Their founding motto — "Don't believe everything you think" — set the tone for an event that prized questioning, skepticism, and intellectual courage above all else.
Over its run, CDI attracted some of the most provocative and celebrated minds of the era. Past speakers included physicist Stephen Hawking, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, futurist Ray Kurzweil, philosopher Peter Singer, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin — alongside novelists, economists, architects, and political thinkers from across the globe. The festival became a significant intellectual landmark in Latin America, unique in its ambition to bring world-class ideas to a Mexican audience and to position Puebla as a global gathering place for human curiosity.
The festival's community of participants — affectionately called "ideastas" by the founders — developed projects and proposals with measurable social impact, advancing emotional intelligence and human development across the region.
The 2017 edition marked the festival's 10th anniversary, celebrated under the theme Beyond X. The speaker roster included writer Noam Chomsky, technologist Kevin Kelly, psychologist Esther Perel, Nobel Prize winner David Gross, linguist Steven Pinker, and more than 60 additional luminaries drawn from science, design, architecture, the humanities, and beyond.
For the fourth consecutive year, Alphachimp was invited to create live speaker posters for each presentation — real-time visual summaries drawn on-site as each talk unfolded. The work was integrated into the festival's broader artistic and cultural program alongside short films, artistic interventions, and interactive installations.
The visual posters from Beyond X are documented in the gallery above. They represent a small piece of a remarkable decade of ideas — and a record of what it looked like when some of the world's sharpest minds gathered in the high desert of central Mexico to think out loud together.
For more about La Ciudad de las Ideas and its legacy, visit their YouTube channel.
Alphachimp has been creating live graphic recordings at conferences, festivals, and summits for over 25 years — capturing complex ideas as visual artifacts that outlast the event itself.
If you're planning a conference or summit and want your speakers' ideas preserved visually in real time, see how our graphic recording service works.
