Newsletter 146
I'm back ;)
Hey — it’s been a while. A long while, actually.
I know. Eighteen months of silence is a lot to ask patience for, and you didn’t even know you were being asked. So first things first: thank you. Genuinely. Whether you stuck around by inertia or by choice, it means something that you’re still here. I let this newsletter drift into a kind of greatest-hits loop — recycling old content, going through the motions — and eventually it felt more honest to just stop than to keep pretending. So I did.
But I’ve been feeling the pull again lately. That itch to share things — not because I have to, not on a schedule, but because something crossed my path and I thought you’d probably want to know about this. That’s the version of this I want to do: personal, a bit unfiltered, a mix of professional stuff and the things I’m genuinely obsessed with at any given moment. No editorial calendar, no promises about frequency — just me showing up when I have something worth saying and trying to keep it that way.
So. Here’s what’s been living in my tabs lately.
🎵 Eli Escobar — House of Yes (2/6)
Eli Escobar has a monthly all-night residency at House of Yes in Brooklyn called House of Grooves — six hours, open to close, every month. The man is a New York institution. This SoundCloud set from February is exactly what you want from him: deep house sliding into techno, a disco detour, a hip-hop break, and then back to a four-to-the-floor NY house stomper. I’ve had it on repeat during long work sessions and it hasn’t gotten old. One of those mixes that makes you genuinely nostalgic for a club you’ve never been to.
A site that compares and reviews design tools by role and use case — ranking them by what actually matters depending on whether you’re an art director, a design engineer, or someone who just needs to ship something without a design background. The landscape has exploded in the last year — AI-native tools, code-native canvases, things that blur the line between designing and building — and this is the sanest overview I’ve found of all of it. Bookmark it if you work anywhere near product or design.
The self-described one-stop shop for every digital artist — textures, fonts, mockups, PNGs, Photoshop plugins, all of it. The library covers everything from paper textures and vintage assets to anatomy illustrations and music mockups. The aesthetic is raw, a bit underground, clearly made by people who actually use this stuff. I keep coming back here when I need something that doesn’t look like it came from a stock site.
📖 Pet Shop Boys × Mark Farrow — Wallpaper*
This one hit me hard. To mark the 40th anniversary of Pet Shop Boys’ debut album Please, Wallpaper* sat down with Mark Farrow — their long-term designer and creative partner — for a retrospective conversation tied to the release of Volume: The Complete Visual Record. Farrow has been doing their sleeves, packaging, and visual identity since the beginning, with a minimalist precision that’s won him multiple Grammys, D&AD awards, and a Royal Designer for Industry designation. The interview gets into how specific design decisions were made — there’s a bit about the Yes album tick graphic and how PSB actually removed a track from the record so the geometry would work better. That’s the kind of creative obsession I find completely irresistible.
⚡ Mokkit
A browser-based tool that takes static screenshots and turns them into animated device mockups — iPhone frames, browser windows — and exports them as MP4 or WebM, including a transparent background option so you can drop the animation cleanly into any web page or marketing material. No design skills required, ready in seconds. I know that sounds like a lot of things that don’t deliver, but this one actually does. Useful if you ever need to demo an app or a web product without spending half a day in After Effects.
Look, not everything needs a justification. Sometimes you’re scrolling Wallapop and you find a seller whose taste is just inexplicably good — the right mix of vintage pieces, things that shouldn’t work together but do, priced like they actually want to sell them. That’s mariaf. I’ve already bought one thing. I’m watching a second. No further comment.
That’s it for this one. Glad to be back. More soon — whenever “soon” turns out to be.
— Wences