📬 Newsletter 150
On being in the room.
Last Saturday was Paradís Valencia, and it was everything I hoped it would be.
Nine talks at CaixaForum València — Tres Tipos Gráficos, Venetia Thorneycroft from Ragged Edge, Estudio Marta Botas, María Cerdán, Caliper, Lara Lars, Your Majesty, Alberto Martínez, and a last-minute addition I want to acknowledge properly. Zak Kyes from Zak Group had to withdraw for health reasons shortly before the event, and we reached out to Ordinari, a Valencia-based studio, to step in on very short notice. They said yes without hesitation, and they delivered. I’m genuinely grateful for that — it’s the kind of thing that tells you a lot about people.
I keep coming back to why events like this matter. You can follow every studio on Instagram, read every case study, have the right podcasts in your ears during your commute — and still miss the thing that only happens when a room full of people is genuinely present at the same moment. The conversation that happens in the hallway between talks. The question someone asks from the audience that unlocks something you’d been sitting with for weeks. The chance encounter with someone whose work you’ve admired from a distance, now standing two meters from you with a coffee in their hand. None of that fits in a feed.
For professionals it’s a recalibration. For students it can be something more — sometimes genuinely formative. The first time you hear someone whose work you admire explain how they actually think, it changes something. That’s also why keeping Paradís accessible matters to me. A ticket that costs less than a dinner out is a ticket a student can actually buy. That’s not an accident — it’s a decision we make every year, because the room is better for it.
I’m already thinking about the next edition. If you have a name — a studio, a practitioner, a voice from any discipline — that you think deserves to be on a stage like this, I want to hear it. My inbox is open.
One more thing before getting into the links, and this one’s a rant I’ve been sitting on for a while. Salary transparency in job postings — why isn’t this universal yet? The EU Pay Transparency Directive requires all member states to transpose legislation by June 7, 2026, mandating that job postings include the gross annual salary or at minimum the expected pay range, while also prohibiting interviewers from asking candidates about their previous salary. In the US, states like California and New York have already been leading the way, with laws requiring companies to disclose salary ranges in job postings. But most large European economies — Germany, France, the Netherlands — are still legislating and will likely miss even the EU deadline. It’s 2026. The idea that you can ask someone to invest weeks of time in an interview process without telling them what the job pays is a form of disrespect dressed up as standard practice. Salary information is not negotiating leverage. It’s basic information people need to make decisions about their own lives. The sooner it’s mandatory everywhere, the better.
Okay. Here’s what else has been in my tabs.
A personally compiled graphic design archive showcasing the vast visual identity created by Otl Aicher and his Dept. XI team for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, collected and curated by Alessandro Rinaudo. If you know Aicher’s work — the pictograms, the color system, the typography — you already know why this matters. If you don’t, this is the best possible place to start. The 1972 Munich identity is arguably the most comprehensive and coherent visual identity ever applied to an event at that scale. Every corner of the archive is worth exploring slowly.
Museum Department is an indexed archive of contemporary graphic design and typography — searchable via CMD+K, updated regularly, built around the idea of curating contemporary culture. It sits somewhere between a reference library and a mood board, but more rigorous than either. The kind of resource that earns a permanent tab.
Exactly what it says: the details behind the world’s best websites, updated weekly. Not full-page screenshots — the details. Navbars, heroes, footers, buttons, scroll interactions. The things you notice when you’re paying attention and miss when you’re not. I’ve found myself going back to this repeatedly when working on anything web-adjacent. The curation is sharp.
🏀 He Designed the Knicks Logo 30+ Years Ago. They’re Still Using It. — Fast Company
Michael Doret grew up near Coney Island and was shaped by New York’s rich graphic environment — he says the city is not in his bones but in his brain. In 1991, the NBA called asking if he wanted to redesign his hometown team’s logo, which hadn’t been updated in nearly 30 years. The result — an inverted triangle, extruded block letters, an orange basketball — has been on every Knicks jersey, every courtside banner, and every broadcast lower-third ever since.
The timing of this piece is perfect. The Knicks just won their first NBA championship in 53 years, and the brand is having a cultural moment that goes well beyond basketball — the orange and blue is everywhere, the merch is selling out, and suddenly everyone in New York has always been a Knicks fan. Which makes it even more satisfying that the logo carrying all of that weight is the same one Doret drew in 1992. Longevity in logo design isn’t luck. It’s the result of every element earning its place, and nothing more being added than needs to be there.
🔤 How to Articulate — index.how
A vocabulary resource: the words designers use when they know what they’re looking at. Organized by category — typography, layout, color, composition — with precise, usable definitions for terms like kerning, tracking, leading, optical kerning, tabular numerals, x-height. I’ve sent this to students more times than I can count. Half of design criticism fails not because people can’t see what’s wrong, but because they don’t have the language to name it. This helps with that.
🎵 Brian Jackson — Now More Than Ever (Spotify)
This is the one I’ve had on loop all week. Brian Jackson — Gil Scott-Heron’s long-time musical partner — revisits key songs from their collaboration on Now More Than Ever, produced by Masters At Work’s Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez. Across nineteen tracks, Jackson reimagines classics including “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Winter in America,” “Home Is Where the Hatred Is,” and “The Bottle,” with guests including Black Thought, Omar, Moodymann, Rahsaan Patterson, and Josh Milan bringing new energy to material rooted in soul, jazz, and spoken word. Rather than treating these songs as museum pieces, the album highlights how relevant their themes of resistance, community, and social change remain today. A record that feels like it needed to exist right now.
That’s it for this one. More soon.
— Wences