📬 Newsletter 148
An unexpected success.
In 2023 I started keeping a private folder of bookmarks. Studios I kept returning to, work that made me stop and look closely. At some point the list grew well past the point of being useful to keep to myself — so I turned it into something public: Just a Design List.
It’s a slow, curated index. Almost 900 entries now, and still growing. A few things it is not: exhaustive, scraped, or paid. Every entry is there because the work, at some point, made me pay attention. It leans toward small and medium studios, independent practices, designers who publish their work clearly on the open web. Large network agencies are mostly absent — that part is on purpose.
It’s been getting a reaction on LinkedIn I genuinely didn’t expect. It turns out a lot of people were looking for something exactly like this — a place to find design practices by geography and discipline, without noise. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look. And if you know a studio whose work rewards close attention, send it my way.
Now, let’s get into everything else.
🎵 Terry Hunter — Soulful House | Black House Radio
Black House Radio is a homecoming for Black DJs and Black sound, paying homage to the past, present, and future of house music — bridging generations of artists and listeners and acting as a guiding light for Black DJs and their sound. This set from Terry Hunter is the kind of thing you put on and forget to turn off. Born and raised in Chicago and introduced to music early by his father — a DJ who played mostly soul and disco at a west side tavern — Hunter has spent decades traveling the globe sharing his passion for soulful house. The set feels like a sweaty 90s basement party: deep grooves, soulful cuts, the whole thing. Pure Chicago lineage. One for the long sessions.
📁 Chus Margallo — Weird Folders
Chus Margallo is a Barcelona-based art director and UX/UI designer whose work I’ve followed for a while — his portfolio site functions like a retro operating system, complete with music player, skate game, writing tool, paint app, guestbook, and CRT effects, and it won Site of the Day on Awwwards. But his latest side project is what really caught my attention: Weird Folders, a collection of the strange, beautiful, and inexplicable things designers accumulate in the forgotten corners of their hard drives. Anyone who’s been doing this long enough will recognize it immediately — the folder called “FINAL_v3_REALLYFINAL_thisone” and what’s inside it. Chus turned that into something worth looking at. Go see what he’s building.
Flat & Bound offers carefully selected posters and books on modernist design, architecture, and art — hidden away in archives, analogue testimonies that can’t unfold their full effect, brought to enthusiasts at fair prices to enhance and expand their own collections. The inventory ranges from original modernist print ephemera to limited-edition silkscreen runs by contemporary graphic designers working in the tradition of their predecessors. It’s the kind of site where you go to look at one thing and end up spending forty minutes. I found a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster reprint that’s been living in my wishlist ever since.
🎺 Miles Davis & The Synthesizer — Electronic Sound
This piece from Electronic Sound is ostensibly about Miles Davis’s electric period — the moment in 1985 when he signed to Warner Bros and threw himself fully into synthesizers and funk production. But what it really made me think about was something bigger.
Davis wrote in his autobiography: “The synthesizer has changed everything whether purist musicians like it or not. It’s here to stay and you can either be in it or out of it. I choose to be in it because the world has always been about change. People who don’t change will find themselves like folk musicians, playing in museums.”
Swap “synthesizer” for “generative AI” and you have the conversation we’re all having right now. The parallels are striking: a powerful new tool arrives, the establishment recoils, the purists declare the death of the form, and meanwhile a handful of people — Miles among them — absorb it completely and make something nobody had heard before. Herbie Hancock recalls arriving at a studio session to find a Fender Rhodes keyboard in place of a grand piano, and thinking disdainfully that Davis wanted him to play a “toy” piano. The toy piano changed music. I think about that a lot these days. The question isn’t whether the tool is legitimate — it’s whether you’re willing to be in it.
That’s it for this one. More soon.
— Wences