📬 Newsletter 149
Paradís Valencia 2026
I want to start with something I’ve been building for a few years now.
Paradís Valencia is a one-day design and creativity conference held every year in Valencia, and since 2022 I’ve been its curator. Putting together an event like this is a different kind of work from everything else I do — it’s part instinct, part obsession, and a lot of conversations. You spend months thinking about what a day of talks should feel like, what ideas should be in the room, which voices deserve a stage.
Looking back across the editions, the roster has been remarkable. From Brian Collins (from Collins), Yarza Twins, Pangram Pangram and Gemma O’Brien to Braulio Amado, Domestic Data Streamers, Area 17, Pentagram’s Andrea Trabucco-Campos, and Vasilis Marmatakis — and that’s before getting to 2026. This year’s edition takes place on June 13th at CaixaForum València, with talks from Tres Tipos Gráficos, Zak Group, María Cerdán, Estudio Marta Botas, Caliper, Lara Lars, Your Majesty, and more.
I think about why events like this matter a lot. Not in an abstract way — in a very practical one. The design industry moves fast and often in silos. You can follow everything online, have every podcast in your ears and every studio’s Instagram on your screen, and still miss the thing that only happens when a room full of people is genuinely paying attention to someone on a stage. The quality of focus is different. The conversations that happen in the hallway during a coffee break, the question someone asks that unlocks something you’d been sitting with for months — that doesn’t happen in a feed. For professionals, it’s a recalibration. For students, it can be genuinely formative: the first time you hear someone whose work you admire explain how they actually think, it changes something.
That’s why I also care about keeping Paradís accessible. A ticket that costs as much as a decent dinner is a ticket that a student can actually buy. That’s not accidental — it’s a decision we make every year, because the room is better when it’s not just people who can expense it.
I’m already thinking about next year’s edition. If you have a name — a studio, a designer, a practitioner from any discipline — whose work you think deserves to be on a stage like this, I genuinely want to hear it. My inbox is open.
Now, the rest of what’s been on my mind.
🎵 Louie Vega — Live at 214 Mulberry, New York
Louie Vega brings New York’s deep-rooted dance legacy to 214 Mulberry with an hour-long set rooted in house, rhythm and soul. Alongside Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, Vega is one of the most influential figures in the history of house music — and this set makes the case without needing to say a word. The duo have spent recent years digging through their archive of two-inch tapes for the monthly MAW Lost Tapes series, with unreleased material that rivals the pure power of their best releases. Put this on, then read the DJ Mag piece that follows, and you’ve got an afternoon well spent.
💿 Masters At Work — How Nuyorican Soul Took the Duo Back to Their Latin Roots
This DJ Mag longread is the deep dive that Nuyorican Soul has always deserved. Two decades before Daft Punk rolled back the technological years on Random Access Memories, Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez and Little Louie Vega — aka Masters At Work, kings of New York house in the mid-1990s — went back to their own roots. The result was Nuyorican Soul, an uber-lush vision of dance music recorded with an elite team of studio musicians and majestic special guests, adding salsa spice, jazz swing, and soul glow to a disco blueprint — a percussive tribute to their hometown. The eclecticism of the record is a product of their New York roots, with Vega’s father a jazz saxophonist and his uncle the singer Héctor Lavoe of the Fania All-Stars. A record I keep returning to, and a piece worth reading slowly.
🔤 Pica — Font Management for macOS
I’ve tried most font managers and they all eventually get in the way. Pica is a native macOS app built by Josh Puckett that handles logo previews, color themes, full OpenType support, custom collections, one-click activation, and watch folders — and it’s free. The interface is exactly what you want: clean, fast, no subscription. If you work with type at any level and you’re on a Mac, this is the one.
Jumyoung Lee is a designer and the founder of TypeTypeType, a design community focused on typography. His tools page is one of those rare corners of the internet that makes you want to sit down and play for an hour. The collection includes Dancing Type, a browser-based motion typography tool that transforms text into real-time audio-driven compositions; a dot-matrix text renderer that converts any font into customizable dot grids exportable as SVG; a Liquid Metal Generator for turning shapes or text into fluid, reflective metal; and a motion graphics tool where organic cell patterns grow and breathe inside letterforms, exportable as PNG, SVG, or video. All browser-based, all free, all genuinely surprising. The kind of work that reminds you why typography is endlessly interesting.
🎬 The Art Direction of Zendaya × Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze directed Shape of Dreams, a three-minute surrealist film for Swiss sportswear brand On, starring Zendaya and set inside her imagined “Dream Lab” — where silhouettes shift and fabrics change shape before landing in their final form. This video from Jason Murray breaks down the art direction of the campaign: the commitment to practical effects, the choreographed surrealism, the stripped-back white room that forces you to focus entirely on movement and transformation. It’s three minutes of genuinely beautiful filmmaking dressed as a commercial, and the analysis is worth watching alongside the piece itself. A good reminder that the best advertising doesn’t feel like advertising at all.
That’s it for this one. See you in Valencia on June 13th if you can make it.
— Wences