Towards the end of his life, Conrad Meyer began to write a family chronicle. This document, which is now kept in the Zurich Central Library, presents a nuanced picture of middle-class life in 17th century Zurich and is an important source for the biographies of his relatives. It tells us that his father had originally trained as a glass painter. This was a very important branch of art at the time, as many wealthy people had their windows decorated with color and stained glass – for example with a family coat of arms or a biblical story – was a traditional gift. However, hardly any of Dietrich's works on glass or glass cracks, as the preliminary drawings for the glass paintings are called, are known. We do know, however, that he acquired knowledge of oil painting through self-study after his training. In the 1590s at the latest, he began to paint portraits, a subject that had largely fallen into disuse since the death of Hans Asper in Zurich in 1571. But when Samuel Hofmann from Basel returned to Switzerland in 1622 after his years of travel and settled in Zurich, he became a serious competitor. His "modern" style of painting, trained in Amsterdam, immediately found favor and supplanted father Meyer as a portrait painter. He is likely to have shifted his focus increasingly to graphic work and his posts at the Grossmünster Abbey. He had been head of finances there since 1614 and administrator of the abbey in 1630. He was appointed alderman in 1641.

The most popular of his works, however, was the Zurich coat of arms book, the first edition of which was published in 1605. It lists the coats of arms of around 500 prestigious Zurich families on over fifty pages. Conrad Meyer republished this very popular work in 1674 and expanded it to include a history of the previous mayors of Zurich since Rudolf Brun, some updated coats of arms and an index of names, which revealed whether a family was of noble or bourgeois status.