# Stash: all articles, full text > 17 articles from Stash (https://stash.cool), a curated directory of tools and resources for designers, by Steve Salgado. Each article below is complete. The index of finds is in https://stash.cool/llms.txt. --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/openpencil/ Published: 2026-10-01 Author: Steve Salgado About: OpenPencil (https://openpencil.dev/) # A Figma alternative you can read every line of *Tools · 4 min read* Most design teams live in Figma, and most of the time that's fine. But every so often you need to open a .fig file without an account, work on a plane, hand a file to someone outside the team, or get a coding agent to read a design properly. That's when it helps to have something you actually own. OpenPencil is a free, open-source design editor that opens Figma files natively. It runs in the browser or as a small desktop app, needs no account or internet connection, and is MIT licensed, so you can read and change all of it: the editor, the rendering engine, the file format code and the command line tools. ## It speaks Figma OpenPencil opens .fig files directly, and you can copy and paste between Figma and OpenPencil. The project says its file codec keeps round-trip fidelity, so what you open is what you save. Inside, it looks and works the way you'd expect: pages and layers on the left, a canvas in the middle, and design, layout and auto layout controls on the right. ## Free and local There's no sign-up and no server. You can use the web app at app.openpencil.dev, or download the desktop app for macOS, Windows or Linux. On a Mac it's one line with Homebrew ("brew install --cask openpencil"), and the app is around 7 MB. Collaboration works without a server too. It connects people directly over WebRTC, so you share a link and edit together with live cursors and a follow mode. ## Built for AI and automation This is where it gets interesting for anyone working with code. OpenPencil has a built-in AI chat with 90 tools that can create shapes, set styles, manage layout and analyze design tokens. It also ships an MCP server, so Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf can work with your designs directly. For automation there's a headless command line tool to inspect, export and analyze .fig files, with JSON output for build pipelines, Tailwind CSS export, and support for running Figma Plugin API code. And if you'd rather build your own editor, the Vue SDK lets you embed OpenPencil in another product or make a custom editor around the same core. ## Heads up It's young. The project went up on GitHub in February 2026, and the latest release at the time of writing is version 0.15.1, so expect rough edges and missing features compared with Figma. For a team's day-to-day design work, Figma is still the safer choice for now. The command line tool installs separately from the desktop app, with "npm install -g @open-pencil/cli". ## Who it's for Designers who want a free, offline way to open and edit Figma files. Design engineers who want their coding agents to read real design files. Teams building their own design tools, who'd rather start from an open editor than from scratch. With nearly 9,000 stars on GitHub in its first seven months, plenty of people are already watching. Try the online demo before you download anything. [Visit openpencil.dev ↗](https://openpencil.dev/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/dots/ Published: 2026-09-30 Author: Steve Salgado # An assistant that keeps working after you close the tab *Tools · 5 min read* Most AI tools wait for you. You open a chat, ask for something, get it, and the moment you close the tab the work stops. Anything that happens between conversations is still your job. Dots are OpenAI's attempt to change that. Launched on September 29, they're what OpenAI calls "always-on agents": a personal assistant inside ChatGPT that keeps working toward your goals when you're not there, notices things that need doing, and brings you finished work to approve. The launch film casts them as friendly little characters, a blue blob in a beret among them, and you give yours a name when you set it up. ## How it works Each dot runs on GPT-6 Astra and has its own cloud computer and browser, so it can browse, build and work through tasks itself. You can open that computer at any time and watch what it's doing. It starts with context from your ChatGPT memory, connects to the apps you choose (OpenAI says over 4,000 through its plugins), and uses Codex for building and coding tasks. You talk to it in ChatGPT on desktop, web or mobile, by message or by voice call. It also works in Slack and Microsoft Teams, with texting coming next, and it carries the same context across all of them. Start something in ChatGPT, mention it in a Slack channel, and your dot picks up where you left off. The part that makes it different is what OpenAI calls proactive research. When you're not working with it, your dot looks through your connected apps for ways to help, using read-only access, so it can't send anything or change anything on its own while it's looking. ## What it's good for OpenAI's examples lean toward work that keeps changing under you. A few that will sound familiar to anyone in a creative team: - **Launches:** when a product's scope changes, it works out what that means for the story and prepares revised launch materials and docs for your review. - **Decks:** it keeps a leadership deck current as new numbers arrive, and flags what still needs figuring out. - **Content:** it learns your voice and audience, finds moments to clip from an interview transcript, and drafts show notes and social posts for your approval. Outside work, one of the launch page's examples is dinner: your dot brings you delivery options with totals, and places the order once you approve. ## You stay in charge Dots come with built-in rules for when to act and when to ask. You can add Custom Rules to allow, require approval for, or block specific actions, and follow everything, including background work, in an Activity View. Anything that could affect your accounts or share information goes through a check called auto-review, and some things, like changing a password, always stay with you. Your own computer stays separate unless you choose to connect it. ## Heads up Access is limited for now. Dots are rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium users in eligible markets, and Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare workspaces can try the beta if their admin turns it on. Your first dot is included in those plans, and chatting with it doesn't count toward your ChatGPT limits, though tasks it runs in Codex or ChatGPT Work do. You set it up in the desktop app or a desktop browser before it works on mobile. It's also brand new, and OpenAI says so plainly: dots can still make mistakes, so review anything that matters. Giving an assistant access to your email, calendar and files is a real decision, and it's worth starting with a small, well-defined job before handing over anything important. ## Who it's for People whose work never quite sits still: creative leads juggling launches, founders, producers and anyone who spends too much of the day keeping things up to date. If you're already on Pro or Business Premium, it costs nothing extra to try. Give it one responsibility you'd happily hand off, and see what it brings back. [Visit chatgpt.com ↗](https://chatgpt.com/features/dots/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/taste-labs/ Published: 2026-09-30 Author: Steve Salgado About: Taste Labs (https://tastelabs.com/) # Can taste be turned into data? *Tools · 5 min read* Ask an AI tool for a website and you'll get one fast. It'll be tidy, technically fine and a lot like every other site it has ever made. Making things is easy for machines now. Telling the good from the merely average is where they fall down. Taste Labs is betting that's a solvable problem. The San Francisco company calls itself "the taste layer for AI," and its mission line doesn't hedge: "Ending AI slop." It launched last October, raised an $18.5 million seed round co-led by CRV, and, according to a [Business Insider feature](https://www.businessinsider.com/taste-labs-ai-good-taste-creativity-slop-2026-9) this week, already brings in "tens of millions in revenue." ## How you teach a model taste The founder and CEO, Thais Castello Branco, previously worked at Kraft Heinz and was an early employee at the AI search company Exa. Her thesis is that taste is a form of pattern recognition, so it can be broken down and learned. The way in is people. Taste Labs works with a network of about 1,000 Tastemakers, contractors from creative fields who design things and explain their choices, grade AI outputs and review each other's grades. An art director who has worked for Adobe and Adidas told Business Insider the work means breaking design into observable parts like typography, motion, color and texture, and that "it's not as simple as just rating out of 10." All of that becomes training data. The company says it works with "the top frontier labs," though it won't say which, starting with product websites, slide decks and brochures before moving into copywriting, fiction, music and film. ## The Brand API The part you can actually use today is the Brand API, currently in beta. It does three things: - **Brand extraction:** give it a URL and it returns the whole brand system as structured data: logos, color palettes, fonts, motion, textures, shadows and more, plus screenshots and the captured HTML and CSS. - **Style search:** describe a look in plain words, like "a dreamy brand" or "dark brutalist developer tools," and it finds matching brands in a curated index. - **Verify adherence:** compare a new page against a reference brand and get a score, a written critique and a to-do list of fixes, worst first. It's built for developers and AI agents. There's an MCP server that works with Claude Code, Cursor and Codex, so an agent can pull a brand before it builds and check its own work after. ## Pricing You get 20 free credits to try it. After that, Starter is $99 a month for 600 credits and Pro is $749 a month for 6,000. An extraction or a verification costs 2 credits, and a search costs 1 or 2 depending on depth. ## Heads up This is infrastructure for people building AI tools. Unless you're building with AI agents, the Brand API is more interesting to read about than to use, and two of its three tools are still marked alpha. The bigger question is the one Business Insider raised: do we want AI to define what's great? Castello Branco's answer is that the goal is raising the floor, getting everyday AI output to a baseline of quality, and helping people who can't code or draw get closer to what they had in mind. That's a reasonable aim. It's also worth noticing that taste usually comes from years of looking, making and getting it wrong, and no amount of graded data does that part for you. (More on that in [When you can make anything, the job is knowing what's yours](/articles/taste-and-judgement/).) One finding from the company's own research is worth keeping in mind: after analyzing more than two million websites going back a decade, Taste Labs says the web was already becoming more alike before AI arrived. ## Who it's for Developers and teams building AI tools that make visual work, who want those tools to stay on brand. Design leads curious about where AI design is heading. And designers who'd like to be part of it: the Tastemakers network takes applications, and it pays people for exactly the judgement this whole industry runs on. If taste is the thing you care about, this is a company worth watching closely, and arguing with. [Visit tastelabs.com ↗](https://tastelabs.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/make-the-deck/ Published: 2026-09-29 Author: Steve Salgado # Make the deck. Make it beautiful. *Opinion · 8 min read* Every creative industry has its deck jokes. Death by PowerPoint. "Can you just make it look nice?" The forty-slide credentials section nobody asked for. Somewhere along the way, making the deck became the job you hand to whoever's newest, the chore that happens after the real work. I think that gets it almost exactly backwards. The deck is where an idea gets shaped, where the hard calls get made, and where the thinking either holds together or falls apart. It deserves as much care as the work it carries. ## A slideshow that won an Oscar An Oscar-winning documentary started life as a deck. Before [*An Inconvenient Truth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth) was a film, Al Gore had given his climate slideshow more than 1,000 times, by his own estimate, changing it a little after every room. Nobody made a movie out of the first version. They made it out of the thousandth, the one that had been worn smooth by every audience that got lost, lost interest or leaned in. By the time it reached the screen, the story had already done its work in the deck. The film just gave it a bigger room. ## Where the story actually starts On a big idea, a campaign or a brand, I go all in on discovery first. Moodboards, immersion, everything the brief touches. Then, once I've planted a few flags I feel good about, I start the deck. Early, well before I know the answer. That's the point. The deck forces my hand. Is this on idea? Is it on brand? Is it selling the capability, or the product? Every page has to earn its place next to the one before it, so any gap in the thinking shows up fast. I read it back as if I'm the client sitting in the room, hearing this pitch for the first time, then again, then again. If I keep getting lost at the same point, that's the idea telling me it isn't ready. We pivot there. "Storytelling" is an overused word, and plenty of people sell their own formula for it. Pick the one that suits you. The test I use is whether the story feels like a conversation you could have with someone, where they walk away knowing where you started, where you went, and where you're going next. It helps that I save decks. Ones I love, keynotes, pitches that landed, even a really well-built email someone sent me. They sit in a folder and come back when I need them. When I'm selling an integrated campaign, I'll remember a deck with the right shape, the same kind of bets in the same order, and borrow its structure as a starting framework. That's also an early pressure test. If the new idea won't sit in a flow that has worked before, it's worth asking why. If you don't have a folder like that yet, [Deck.Gallery](/index/deck-gallery/) is a good place to start one. It's a curated library of presentation design, with pitch decks, keynotes, reports and brand guidelines from companies like Instacart and Zapier, and a new deck added every day. The polish is nice, but the real value is seeing shapes: how a report opens, how a pitch gets from the problem to the ask. ## Write it for the kid at the back This is why I build decks a bit like a children's book. One clear thought per page. Pictures that do real work. A shape anyone can follow. Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats shared a version of that shape in her [22 rules of storytelling](https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/) in 2011: once upon a time there was something. Every day, this happened. One day, something changed. Because of that, this, and because of that, this, until finally. It's a bedtime story, and it's also a very good pitch. Story is half of it. The other half is plain instruction. Can someone follow it step by step without you there? Think of the last IKEA flat-pack you built, staring at a wordless drawing of a tiny man and a dowel, wondering how page six got from there to a finished Kallax. I'd feel real pain handing someone a deck like that, knowing it was the best I could do at explaining how the thing goes together. It also helps to be a little dumb about the subject. When I'm not the expert, I can't hide behind jargon, so I end up building something the least informed person in the room can follow. Oddly, that's usually the version the experts like best as well. ## Beautiful, because it counts I'm not a sketch-on-a-napkin person. The deck should be as beautiful as the idea and as the work, because it's the piece sitting between the two. It's like a movie: people are finally seated, the lights are down, and they're listening to what you have to say. It has to count. So it gets proper communication design: whitespace, a clear hierarchy, pages that breathe and are easy to take in at a glance. A lot of designers and agencies treat deck design as beneath them. I think that's how good ideas get lost between the meeting and the approval. It also has to survive without you. I love a minimal, theatrical presentation with one word on a slide, but the reality now is that someone opens the link three weeks later, alone, and forwards it to their boss. A deck that carries the story on its own will beat one that only works with you standing next to it. ## The AI reality To be fair, the skeptics have a point. A beautiful deck can sell a bad idea, and plenty have. A bad deck can also leave a good idea out to pasture. Polish is a form of persuasion, and persuasion without substance is exactly what gave decks their reputation. AI makes that easier than ever. Every tool that makes decks now wants to make them for you. Gamma, the AI presentation startup, [raised money at a $2.1 billion valuation](https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/) last November. In June, Google [started rolling out Gemini in Slides](https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/06/create-fully-native-and-editable-presentations-with-Gemini-in-Google-Slides.html) to build a full presentation from a single prompt, and in May OpenAI [put ChatGPT inside PowerPoint](https://winbuzzer.com/2026/05/24/openai-puts-chatgpt-inside-powerpoint-with-beta-add-in-xcxwbn/) to create and edit slides without leaving the app. In a minute you get something with a title slide, a clean layout and confident headlines. The trouble is that looking finished was never the hard part. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp Labs have a name for this: ["workslop,"](https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity) AI-generated work that looks good but doesn't move anything forward. In their survey, 41% of US workers had received some in the past month, and each one took nearly two hours to deal with. A generated deck is the perfect workslop delivery system: it's polished enough that nobody questions it until the meeting, when it turns out to be about nothing. I use these tools, and they're handy for a first shape, a quick structure or a layout pass. But a deck that writes itself skips the part where you find out if the idea holds. You never get lost on page seven, so you never learn why. Keep pressure testing it. Read it as the client, and make sure you're not just talking to yourself. ## Make the deck So make the deck, and make it early. Start it once you have a few flags planted, borrow the shape of one you've saved, and use it to find out whether the idea holds. Read it as the client, as the new starter, as the person who opens the link cold. Cut whatever confuses them. Then make it beautiful, because the deck is where the idea lives or dies, long before it ever gets out of the boardroom. ## Sources - Gamma raises at $2.1B valuation: [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/10/ai-powerpoint-killer-gamma-hits-2-1b-valuation-100m-arr-founder-says/), November 2025 - Gemini generates full presentations in Google Slides: [Google Workspace Updates](https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/06/create-fully-native-and-editable-presentations-with-Gemini-in-Google-Slides.html), June 2026 - ChatGPT add-in for PowerPoint: [WinBuzzer](https://winbuzzer.com/2026/05/24/openai-puts-chatgpt-inside-powerpoint-with-beta-add-in-xcxwbn/), May 2026 - "AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity," BetterUp Labs and Stanford Social Media Lab: [Harvard Business Review](https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity), September 2025 - Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim, [*An Inconvenient Truth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth), 2006 - Emma Coats, [Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling](https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2013/03/07/pixars-22-rules-of-storytelling/), 2011 --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/taste-and-judgement/ Published: 2026-09-29 Author: Steve Salgado # When you can make anything, the job is knowing what's yours *Opinion · 7 min read* A few weeks before its show in Milan this year, Gucci [filled its Instagram with AI images](https://www.aol.com/articles/gucci-criticised-ai-slop-images-105545561.html). A satellite in space, a horse on a beach, a sports car that looked lifted from a video game, a woman in a fur coat at a café. None of it was bad, exactly. It was just everything, and nothing in particular. The comments called it cheap and lazy, and one line stuck with me: someone asked why Gucci couldn't find a real Milanese grandmother to wear an outfit from 1976. The complaint was barely about the technology. It was a brand looking like it had forgotten what it was for. My view is simple. Now that making things costs almost nothing, the valuable skill has moved from making to judgement: knowing what belongs to your idea and having the nerve to leave everything else out. ## The library with every book in it In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote ["The Library of Babel,"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) a story about a library that holds every possible book. Every combination of letters, every page, in every order. It sounds like paradise until you realize what it means. Somewhere in there is the perfect book, surrounded by an almost infinite number of near misses, and nobody can find it. The librarians go a bit mad. Generative tools have handed every designer their own Library of Babel. Ask for a logo and you get forty. Ask again and you get forty more. Making options has become the easy bit, and choosing between them has quietly become the whole job. There's research on this too. In a [well-known study from 2000](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995), psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a jam tasting in a supermarket. With 24 flavors on the table, more people stopped. With 6, far more people actually bought. Barry Schwartz later built a whole book around it, [*The Paradox of Choice*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice). More options feel like freedom and usually end in paralysis or a worse decision. ## Taste is the gap [Ira Glass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Glass) has a short talk that gets passed around design studios, usually called "The Gap." His point is that beginners get into creative work because they have good taste, and the painful early years are the gap between that taste and what they can actually make. You close it by making a lot of work. AI has done something strange to that gap. It has closed the making side for almost everyone, overnight. What's left exposed is the taste side. When anyone can produce something polished in seconds, polish stops meaning much. What people notice instead is whether the thing has a point of view, and whether it fits. That's why "good enough" is suddenly a problem rather than a relief. There's more of it than ever, and it all looks a bit the same. ## A brand world is a set of refusals The brands I admire most are defined as much by what they won't do as by what they will. Dieter Rams summed up his approach at Braun as ["less, but better."](https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design) Steve Jobs, back at Apple in 1997, told developers that focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. Neither of them was talking about minimalism as a look. They were talking about discipline. Look at the brands that handled AI well this year. Aerie [ran a campaign with Pamela Anderson](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/how-aerie-is-pushing-back-against-ai-content-with-pamela-anderson/815668/) in which she asks an AI tool for "natural" models and gets lifeless results, ending on "Real matters." It worked because it wasn't a stunt. Aerie stopped retouching its models back in 2014 and [pledged in 2025](https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2026/03/30/aerie-doubles-down-on-its-no-ai-pledge-in-its-latest-campaign) never to use AI-generated bodies. The campaign was just the brand being itself, loudly. Equinox did something similar in January with ["Question Everything But Yourself,"](https://www.adweek.com/creativity/in-2026-brands-are-virtue-signaling-about-ai/) pairing unretouched members against warped AI images. Again, it fit. A gym that sells real effort has every reason to distrust shortcuts. Gucci could have used any tool it liked. The trouble was that the images belonged to no one. A house built on Italian craft and a very particular kind of eccentricity published pictures that could have been anybody's. ## The case for more To be fair, the other side has a point. Abundance is useful. Being able to see forty directions in an afternoon means you can kill thirty-nine of them cheaply, and some of the best ideas come from wandering further than you would have on your own. Plenty of great work has come out of play, accident and excess. I use these tools every day and I'm not interested in pretending otherwise. But wandering only helps if you know where home is. Without a point of view, exploring turns into scrolling. ## Stay on course So here's what I think the job is now. A one-line brand statement helps, but it's never been enough on its own. What I actually work from is a living moodboard I carry around in my head: the images, textures, references and feelings that make the brand what it is. I keep going back to it, holding each new thing up against it and feeling it out. Does this belong in that world? Does it take the world somewhere better, or just somewhere else? The moodboard has to be alive. It grows as the brand grows, and every good decision adds to it. But it also has a centre that doesn't move, and that centre is what you protect. Generative tools are brilliant at filling the edges of that board. They're no help at knowing where the centre is. That part is still yours. So use them, and then be ruthless. Keep what deepens the world you're building and let the rest go, even the good ones. Especially the good ones, sometimes. The Library of Babel already has every image in it. The work that matters is choosing the few that are unmistakably yours, and the confidence to leave the rest on the shelf. ## Sources - Gucci's AI images before its Milan show: [AOL](https://www.aol.com/articles/gucci-criticised-ai-slop-images-105545561.html), February 2026 - Aerie and Pamela Anderson, "Real matters": [Marketing Dive](https://www.marketingdive.com/news/how-aerie-is-pushing-back-against-ai-content-with-pamela-anderson/815668/) and [Marketing Brew](https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2026/03/30/aerie-doubles-down-on-its-no-ai-pledge-in-its-latest-campaign), 2026 - Equinox, Aerie and brands against AI slop: [Adweek](https://www.adweek.com/creativity/in-2026-brands-are-virtue-signaling-about-ai/), 2026 - Iyengar and Lepper, "When Choice Is Demotivating": [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995), 2000 - Jorge Luis Borges, ["The Library of Babel"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel), 1941 - Barry Schwartz, [*The Paradox of Choice*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice), 2004 - Dieter Rams, [ten principles for good design](https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design), Vitsœ --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/gd-foundry/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: GD Foundry (https://foundry.gardedesign.se/) # Type drawn by people who design identities for a living *Type Foundries · 5 min read* Gärde Design is a boutique branding studio in Stockholm, and after twenty years of building identities around typography, it kept watching the same thing happen. The typeface would get cut from the budget. So the studio started drawing its own, and GD Foundry is the result. That origin shows in the work. These are typefaces made by people who spend their days on identities, so they're drawn to carry a brand, not just fill a specimen page. And every one of them starts somewhere specific in history. ## One foot in history The foundry's rule is that each release has a lineage, a form shaped by time that it builds on or argues with. In practice, that makes the catalog unusually fun to read. GD Trio, in the video at the top of this article, goes back to the Roman capitals carved into the base of Trajan's Column in 113 AD, the letters behind Adobe's Trajan in 1989. The team worked from studies of the original inscription and earlier Greek stonework, then added something the Romans never would: a Black weight. It was first drawn for the identity of NGLM, a group of design companies, and the case is on the site. GD Bauer is a pointed display serif from a 19th century European tradition, with ink traps that show up at large sizes and a separate text version that keeps its character at body size. It's named after John Bauer, the Swedish illustrator of forests, trolls and silent princesses. GD Grio looks at the moment when 19th century eccentricity met 20th century clarity. It keeps the uneven proportions and curious terminals, and it's built as a variable font, so it moves from text to expressive display. GD Gaio goes the other way. It's a neo-grotesk that sets out to disappear, taking Beatrice Warde's idea that good typography is a crystal goblet. It's the studio's house typeface, with support for over 200 languages. ## The one built for screens GD Unio is the odd one out, and the one most web and product designers will want. It's uniwidth, so every character takes the same horizontal space in every weight. Switch a label from Regular to Bold and nothing moves. Buttons keep their size on hover, links don't shove their neighbors when they go active, and tabs stay put through every state. If you've ever fought a navigation bar that jitters on hover, you'll get it straight away. ## What else is there The rest of the catalog includes Gaio Smooth, Albio, Optio, Octio and Serio, many with display and text cuts. Trial fonts are free, single styles start at €75 and families run from about €114 to €474. One license covers desktop, web and app, priced by company size. The studio also draws bespoke typefaces for brands, from first sketch to final weight, and offers a Brand License that lets a client rename a font so it appears as their own. They also invite requests: if there's a historical face you wish someone would bring back, tell them. They say that's usually where their next typeface starts. ## Heads up It's a young, focused catalog, and most of it leans toward display and identity work. If you need a big workhorse family with dozens of weights and non-Latin scripts, a larger foundry is a better bet. The history is a big part of the appeal, but check the actual letterforms in the trials before you fall for the story. Some of the display cuts are very particular and won't suit every brand. ## Who it's for Identity designers who want type with a real reference behind it, and a good story for the client presentation. Product and web designers who have ever wished bold text didn't reflow. Anyone who enjoys reading how a typeface came to be as much as using it. Start with GD Unio if you work on screens and GD Trio if you work on brands, and download the trials for both. [Visit foundry.gardedesign.se ↗](https://foundry.gardedesign.se/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/typewolf/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Typewolf (https://www.typewolf.com/) # Typewolf is how you stop using the same three fonts *Type · 5 min read* Every designer has a handful of fonts they fall back on. You know the ones. They're safe, they work, and you've used them on so many projects that you've stopped seeing them. At some point a brief comes along that needs something different, and you realize you don't really know where to start. Typewolf is a good place to start. It's run by Jeremiah Shoaf, a designer rather than a type designer, and that's the key to why it works. It isn't about the history of the lowercase g or the finer points of kerning tables. It's about which fonts look good, where they're being used, and what to pair them with. Practical stuff, for people who have to ship something. It launched in 2013 and has grown into one of the most useful type resources on the web, with over 350,000 people using it every month. ## Site of the Day This is the feature most people know it for. Every day Typewolf picks a website with great typography and shows you exactly which fonts it uses. That's it. No long write-up, just a screenshot and a font list. It sounds simple, and it is, but it's incredibly useful. Seeing a typeface in a real layout tells you far more than any type specimen ever will. You see how it handles a big headline, how it sits next to body copy, how it works at small sizes in a nav bar. Scroll back through a few months of these and you'll have a much better sense of what's around. It also answers the eternal question of "what font is that?" at least for the sites that get featured. ## The font pages There are over 1,000 individual font pages, and they're better than you'd expect. Each one has a short description, examples of the font in use, and suggested pairings. The pairings are the bit to pay attention to. Finding a good headline font is easy. Finding the body font that sits well with it is where most people get stuck. ## The lists and guides Typewolf has a lot of lists, and they're genuinely good ones. **The popular fonts lists** show what's trending, which is handy for knowing what's everywhere right now (and therefore what you might want to avoid). **The Definitive Guide to Free Fonts** is exactly what it sounds like. If your budget doesn't stretch to a foundry license, start here. There's more good free type out there than most people realize. **The Best Typography Books for Designers** is a solid reading list if you want to go deeper than the website. There's also the **Flawless Typography Checklist**, which is worth running through before you hand anything over. It's the stuff everyone knows they should check and then forgets at 6pm on a Friday. ## The newsletter It goes out on Tuesdays and it's one of the few design newsletters that's actually worth opening. New sites, new fonts, a bit of commentary. Short enough to read in a coffee break. ## Heads up It's focused on the web. If you work mostly in print or packaging, a lot of the examples won't map directly onto your work, though the font recommendations still hold up. It's also more about what's out there than how to use it well. If you're after type theory or learning the fundamentals properly, you'll want a book (conveniently, there's a list of those). ## Who it's for Web and brand designers picking type for a new project. Anyone stuck in a font rut. Developers who've been handed a design and want to understand why the fonts were chosen. Students who want to build their type knowledge from real examples instead of theory. Next time you're about to reach for the usual suspects, spend ten minutes on Typewolf first. You'll probably still use one of your favorites. But you might not. [Visit typewolf.com ↗](https://www.typewolf.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/friends-of-type/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Friends of Type (https://friendsoftype.com/) # A lettering archive that started as a group chat *Type · 4 min read* Most lettering inspiration online comes in a very particular form. A perfectly lit final piece, a few thousand likes, and no sense of how it got there. It's useful, sort of, but it can make lettering look like something that arrives finished. Friends of Type is the other kind. It's an archive of sketches, experiments and client work from a small group of designers who used to share an office and kept sending each other drawn letters long after they'd moved on. One night in 2009, Erik Marinovich sent Aaron Carámbula a drawing, and Aaron stayed up building a website to give it a home. That site ran for 14 years, and it's now preserved as an archive of 1,307 sketches. ## The friends The core four are Aaron Carámbula, a product, brand and letter designer who co-founded Objective Subject; Erik Marinovich, who draws letters all day and works as Big Animals; Jason Wong, an art director and half of enormouschampion; and Dennis Payongayong from San Francisco. Erik alone has 477 sketches on the site. Over the years they invited guests too, and the list reads like a who's who of American lettering: Jessica Hische, Jon Contino, Dan Cassaro, Tad Carpenter, Jennifer Daniel and plenty more. Each guest has their own archive page, which makes the site a handy way to discover people whose work you'll want to follow further. ## What's in it Everything. Rough pencil warmups sit next to finished client work, like the New York Magazine brush lettering at the top of this article, made by Erik for a run of merch. There are Sprite cans with lyrics turned into lettering, a Valentine's Day workshop Erik taught to his daughter's class using Crayola markers, and early drawings of Roko, a five-weight display face that's now available through Nuform Type. That mix is the point. Seeing the sketch, the digitized version and sometimes the animated one tells you far more about how lettering works than a feed of finished pieces ever will. Posts are labeled with how they were made (drawn, digitized, animated, created), so you can go looking specifically for process. ## How to browse it The homepage scrolls back through the whole archive. There's search, tags, browse by year and a Random button, which is honestly the best way to use it. Hit it a few times while your coffee brews and you'll land on something you would never have searched for. ## Heads up It's an archive now, not a living publication, so nothing new is being added at the old pace. The most recent posts are from 2023. Search and tags are fine but not deep, so if you need a specific style, say a condensed script from the '70s, you'll do better in Fonts In Use or on Typewolf. The site is also clear that the work is "for inspiration, not replication." These are real people's drawings, many of them commissioned, so treat it as a reference shelf and not a clip art folder. ## Who it's for Lettering artists and type designers who want to see how others think on paper. Graphic designers who draw the odd logotype and want a push. Students trying to understand what separates good lettering from okay lettering. Anyone who misses the era when designers posted sketches for each other rather than for an algorithm. Open it, press Random a dozen times, and see who you end up following. [Visit friendsoftype.com ↗](https://friendsoftype.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/filmsupply/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Filmsupply (https://www.filmsupply.com/) # Stock footage that doesn't look like stock footage *Video · 5 min read* Everyone knows the stock footage look. The handshake in a glass office. The team laughing at a laptop. The drone shot over a city that could be anywhere. It's footage that exists to fill a gap, and it looks like it. Filmsupply is built on the opposite idea. It licenses footage from working filmmakers and studios, the kind of material that was shot for real films, ads and music videos, and makes it available for your project. It calls itself the global leader in cinematic footage licensing, and the roster backs that up: filmmakers from studios like M ss ng P eces, Biscuit and Anonymous Content. ## Why it looks different The footage wasn't made to be generic, so it isn't. You get real lighting, real performances and real camera work, with the kind of mood that's hard to fake. When a clip was shot as part of a short film or a campaign, it carries that intent with it, and your edit feels less like it was assembled from parts. Filmsupply also runs Filmsupply Films, which releases award-winning short films and makes the footage from them available to license. It's a smart setup. You can watch the whole film, fall for a shot, and then use it. ## Finding the right clip The library is organized around curated collections, which is where a lot of the discovery happens. Recent ones include VHS Analog Aesthetics, Unique Points of View, Twists and Turns and seasonal sets. The 2025 Trend Report is a good example of how they think about it: a collection built around hypnotic choreography, analog experiences and striking surrealism, pulled from filmmakers across the library. The video at the top of this article comes from it. There's also standard search with filters, and a feature that lets you browse by shoot or scene. If you find one great clip, you can see the rest of what was captured on that shoot, which makes it far easier to build a sequence that actually feels continuous. ## The research service This is the underrated part. Send Filmsupply a brief, a treatment or even a rough description of what you're after, and their team will put a list of clips into your account within one business day, at no extra cost. For anyone who has lost an afternoon scrolling through near-misses, that alone is worth the account. ## The pricing You license per clip, and the price depends on where the footage will be used. Internal use, like meetings, training or shareholder presentations, starts at $109 a clip. Web and social starts at $219 a clip. Extended use, which covers TV and broadcast, film, streaming, out of home, video games and more, is quoted per project. Creating an account is free. ## Heads up It's premium footage at premium prices. If you need twenty clips of generic b-roll for an internal explainer, a subscription library will be far cheaper. Filmsupply makes the most sense when a handful of shots really have to carry the piece. The per-clip model also takes some planning. Costs add up quickly on a longer edit, so it's worth being clear about where the video will run before you start collecting favorites. ## Who it's for Agencies and brands making spots that need to feel cinematic. Editors building pitch films and sizzle reels. Directors assembling mood films for treatments. Anyone whose work would be let down by footage that looks like stock. Start with the 2025 Trend Report collection, even if you're not buying anything yet. It's a good read on where visual culture is heading this year. [Visit filmsupply.com ↗](https://www.filmsupply.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/flim/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Flim (https://flim.ai/) # Flim is the reference library that ends the screenshot hunt *Video · 5 min read* Every treatment, moodboard and pitch deck starts the same way. You know the shot you want. Low sun, long lens, someone walking away from camera. You just can't find it, so you spend an hour scrubbing through films you half remember and screenshotting your laptop, then another hour cropping out the play bar. Flim is built to skip that hour. (And yes, you read that right. It's Flim, not film, although it's about as film as a product gets.) It's a search engine for visual references from film, TV, ads and music videos. Type what you're picturing and it pulls up matching frames. "Knight on a horse" is the example on their homepage, and it works the way you'd hope: a wall of knights on horses, from very different films, all in one place. ## The library The numbers are big. Flim lists more than 1.5 million stills, 400,000 video clips, 5,800 movies, 2,000 TV series, 15,000 ads, 5,500 music videos and 150,000 animations. It's a genuinely deep well, and the mix matters. Being able to pull a frame from a perfume ad next to one from an arthouse film is exactly how real moodboards get made. ## How you search You can search by describing the image in plain words, which is the part that makes it feel modern. There are also advanced filters for narrowing things down, and a reverse image search, so you can drop in a reference you already have and find more like it. That last one is great when a client sends you a single blurry screenshot and says "more of this." Once you've found things, you save them to Boards. Boards can be shared with your team or clients, and paid plans add Smart Suggestions to fill a board out and a Canva integration if that's where your decks live. ## The AI side Flim has leaned hard into AI on its Pro plan. You can generate and edit images and video from a prompt, from Flim's own library or from your own assets, using current models like Nano Banana, Veo and Seedance. There are curated Aesthetics to steer the look, upscaling to 4K, and Magic Boards, which build a visual board straight from a script or a pitch. How useful that is will depend on how you work. For quick treatments and early pitch visuals, turning a script into a first-pass board in a few minutes is a real time saver. For final work, most people will still want real references, which is what the library is for anyway. ## The pricing There's a free plan that's more generous than most. You can search without limits, use the filters and reverse image search, make public Boards and download one still a day at up to 2K. Basic is €14.90 a month and opens up the full 1.5 million stills with unlimited downloads up to 4K. Pro is €34.90 a month and adds more than 410,000 video cuts from ads and music videos, plus all the AI tools. Teams get custom pricing with up to 50% off per seat, and there's access for teachers and students. Flim also offers local pricing for filmmakers in developing nations, which is a nice touch. ## Heads up The AI features are a big part of the pitch now, and if you only want a clean reference library, some of the product can feel like it's aimed at someone else. The best video features also sit behind the Pro plan, so the free tier is really a stills tool. And as with any reference library, it's worth remembering these frames belong to the people who made the films. They're for inspiration and internal decks, not for dropping into finished work. ## Who it's for Directors and DOPs writing treatments. Art directors and creatives building pitch decks. Music video and fashion teams who think in frames. Designers who need a visual language fast and are tired of screenshotting Netflix at 1am. Start on the free plan, search for the shot you've been trying to describe for a week, and see how close it gets. [Visit flim.ai ↗](https://flim.ai/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/livesurface/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: LiveSurface (https://www.livesurface.com/) # LiveSurface makes your mockups look like they were actually made *Mockups · 5 min read* Every designer knows the mockup routine. You finish an identity, then spend the next hour hunting for a business card PSD that isn't the same one everyone used last year. You open it, find the smart object, paste your artwork, and it looks fine. Flat, a bit fake, but fine. Then the client asks what it would look like in gold foil, and you're back in Photoshop faking a highlight with a gradient and hoping nobody zooms in. LiveSurface is built for that moment. It's a mockup app, but it doesn't really think in PSDs. Its pitch is "the fastest way to find and create portfolio-ready mockups," and the trick behind it is a patented way of embedding 3D data inside ordinary photographs. So a photo of a coffee cup isn't just a picture with a flat layer on top. It knows the cup is round, where the light is coming from, and how your artwork should wrap around it. It was founded in 2005 by designer Joshua Distler, and it's now on version 3, currently in beta. ## How it works You pick a surface from their library, drop your artwork on it, and it renders in real time. That's the basic loop, and it's quick. Drag and drop is new in version 3, along with a rebuilt Context Engine that does the rendering fast enough to feel live. The images themselves come from a network of photographers, designers and 3D modelers, which is why the library doesn't have that tired stock mockup look. The Surface Store is split into objects and scenes, and Plus Surfaces let you resize and rotate certain items when you need a specific format or angle. ## The materials are the real reason to use it This is where LiveSurface pulls away from a folder of PSDs. Surfaces react to their environment. Foil reflects the room. Fluorescent ink glows. Varnish catches the light differently from the paper around it. Embossing casts a real shadow, and you can adjust its thickness and texture. Artwork wraps around curved objects properly, and there's camera depth of field, so things fall out of focus the way they would in an actual photo. You control all of it with a handful of sliders: color tint, smoothness, reflectivity, metallicity, glow and transparency. That's enough to build nearly any material yourself, which means "can we see it in copper?" is a thirty-second job instead of an evening. For packaging, print and identity work, that's a big deal. A lot of good ideas die in presentations because the mockup can't show the finish that makes them special. ## Motion, too Version 3 adds snapshots and animation, including moving artwork on surfaces. So a spinning bottle or a screen with your motion work playing on it is possible without leaving the app. The video at the top of this article comes from LiveSurface's own site and gives a good sense of what it can do. ## The pricing It's a subscription. Pro is $18 a month or $172 a year and unlocks every surface and feature on macOS, iPadOS and visionOS. Pro Studio is the same thing for teams, at $172 per seat each year. It's not cheap if you only mock up a business card now and then. If you present work every week, it pays for itself quickly in hours saved and in how much better the work looks. ## Heads up It's Apple-only. There's no Windows or web version, so if your team is mixed, not everyone gets to play. You're also working within their library. The quality is high, but if a client needs one very specific object, you might still end up shooting it or finding a PSD. And since version 3 is in beta, expect the odd rough edge while it settles. ## Who it's for Brand and packaging designers who need finishes to look real. Studios that pitch often and want every presentation to feel expensive. Freelancers building a portfolio who are tired of the same five free mockups. Anyone who's ever tried to fake foil in Photoshop and quietly given up. If most of your mockups are screens and devices, you can probably get by without it. If your work ends up printed, folded, stamped or wrapped, LiveSurface is worth a proper look. [Visit livesurface.com ↗](https://www.livesurface.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/destockd/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Destockd (https://destockd.com/) # Destockd hands public domain footage back to the public *Video · 5 min read* Here's a thing that happens more than it should. You find a great bit of old archival footage, the kind of grainy mid-century clip that would be perfect in a title sequence or a moodboard. You click through to license it and there's a watermark across the middle and a price tag that looks like a typo. Then you find out the footage is public domain. It was made by the U.S. government, paid for with tax money, and legally belongs to everyone. Someone has just put it behind a checkout page. Destockd is one person's answer to that. ## What it is It's a free, searchable archive of more than 41,000 shots taken from U.S. government films in the FedFlix archive, all of it public domain or unrestricted. No watermarks, no pricing tiers. You find a shot you like and you use it. It was built by a YouTuber called Elroddd, who launched it this month with a video essay called "I Killed A Business Model." His argument is simple. This footage was made with public money or donated in good faith, and "institutions are gatekeeping public domain media" by making it hard to find or charging for it anyway. So he built the thing he wanted to exist. It's worth watching the video. It's short, a bit chaotic in a good way, and the case he makes is pretty hard to argue with. ## The search is the clever bit Most footage libraries rely on keywords, which means you're at the mercy of whoever tagged the clips. If nobody thought to write "man looking through binoculars," you're never finding that shot. Destockd skips all that. It uses a CLIP-powered visual search, so you describe what you want to see and it looks at the actual frames. Type "crowd waving flags" or "plane over mountains" or "hands typing" and it finds shots that look like that, whether or not anyone ever labeled them. For archive footage, where the original catalog descriptions are usually a single dry sentence about the whole film, this makes a massive difference. It turns a pile of old reels into something you can actually search. ## Ways in If you don't know what you're after yet, there are three other ways in besides search: - **Collections** gathers shots into curated sets, a good place to start if you just want to see what's there. - **Random** serves up shots at random, which is dangerously good for procrastination and surprisingly good for inspiration. - **Films** lets you browse the source films themselves, handy when you find one great clip and want to see where it came from. The site itself is refreshingly bare. Black header, search bar, a grid of stills. It's there to get you to the footage, not to sell you anything. ## What it's good for Title sequences and brand films that want some texture. Music videos. Pitch decks and moodboards where you need a feeling fast. Documentary and essay-style video, obviously. Collage and editorial design, if you're pulling stills. Anything that suits that slightly uncanny government-film look, which, it turns out, is a lot of things. ## Heads up It's a slice of the public domain, not all of it. By his own account it covers a small fraction of the footage that's out there, and it's all from U.S. government films, so the look and subject matter lean heavily towards mid-century America. Military, industry, civic life, a lot of men in hats. If you need footage of anything outside that world, you'll still be hunting elsewhere. The site also asks you to check the rights information before using anything. Public domain footage can still include things like music, trademarks or recognizable people that come with their own rules, so it's worth a quick look before a clip goes into commercial work. ## Who it's for Video editors and motion designers who need archival texture without the licensing headache. Filmmakers on a budget. Designers making moodboards. Anyone who's ever paid for public domain footage and felt a bit silly about it afterwards. Open it up, type in the strangest thing you can think of and see what comes back. There's a decent chance a government film from 1952 has you covered. [Visit destockd.com ↗](https://destockd.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/momentum/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Momentum (https://momentum.uninspired.app/) # Momentum makes your static work move without learning animation *Tools · 4 min read* There's a specific kind of frustration that comes from finishing a set of visuals you're really happy with, then realizing they need to move. Instagram wants a reel. The case study would look better with something animated at the top. The client asked, casually, if the deck could "have a bit of motion in it." You don't need a motion designer for this. You probably don't even need a proper animation tool. You need something that takes what you've already made and gives it some life, and then gets out of the way. That's Momentum. It's a small browser tool from Uninspired Studio, a product design studio run by Chris and Fabi. Their tagline is "motion without the overhead," and for once a tagline is pretty accurate. ## How it works The whole thing runs on presets. You pick one, drop your visuals in, adjust a handful of sliders and export. That's genuinely the full workflow. There's no timeline, no keyframes and no learning curve to speak of. Their FAQ puts it nicely: if you can adjust your phone's brightness, you can use Momentum. The presets come in three families, and each has at least one free option to try: - **Carousel** includes Curved Basic (free), Horizontal Slider and Single Full. Good for running a series of images through the frame. - **Mask** includes Mask Reveal (free) and Mask Scale Overlap. Good for brand work and anything that wants a bit of drama on entry. - **Instant** has Instant Basic (free), the quickest way to get something moving. Once you've picked one, the controls cover direction, timing, transition and hold. Hold is the one worth playing with. How long each image sits still before it moves on changes the whole feel, from punchy and fast to slow and considered. ## Getting it out Export comes as MP4 or WebM, in 9:16, 1:1 or 16:9. That covers Stories and Reels, the square feed post, and anything widescreen like a deck, a website header or a case study. One set of visuals, three formats, no rebuilding. ## The pricing This is the refreshing part. There's no subscription. Some presets are free, and the premium ones are a one-off purchase of somewhere between €7 and €9 each. Pay once, keep it forever. In a world where every tool wants $15 a month for the privilege of existing on your credit card, that's a nice change. You buy the handful of presets that suit your work and that's the end of the transaction. ## Heads up It does exactly what it says, and not a lot more. You're working within the presets, so if you have a specific motion idea in your head, you probably won't be able to build it here. That's the trade-off for it being this simple. It's also focused on images moving through a frame. If you need to animate type in detail, build UI transitions or make anything with real character to it, you'll want something like Jitter or After Effects. ## Who it's for Designers who need social content from finished work and don't want to spend an afternoon on it. Anyone putting together a portfolio who wants their case studies to open with something moving. Small studios who need a reel of recent work every now and then. Anyone who's ever looked at a folder of JPEGs and thought, these should really move. Start with a free preset, drop in three or four images you're proud of and see how it feels. It takes about as long as reading this did. [Visit momentum.uninspired.app ↗](https://momentum.uninspired.app/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/black-creative-network/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Black Creative Network (https://blackcreativenetwork.com/) # Hiring shouldn't come down to who you know *Creative & Design · 5 min read* Ask a producer how they found the director for their last job and the answer is usually a name. Someone who worked with someone, a friend of a friend, the person who shot that thing everyone liked. It works, but it means the same small circle keeps getting the calls, and a lot of very good people never get looked at. Black Creative Network is built to widen that circle. It's a curated directory of Black creatives around the world, from designers, directors and photographers to writers, strategists, developers and producers. Its own line is "who works on your work matters," and the whole site is set up to make finding and hiring that talent quick. The founders are clear that this isn't only about representation, but about the quality, perspective and depth that lived experience brings to the work. It was founded by Thabiso Junior Ntuli, who is also its creative director, with Dr. Johanna Hoess as co-founder and research director. ## The directory This is the core of it. You can browse by creative field or by city, and each creative has a portfolio page with a showreel, images, a short bio and a link out. More than 300 creatives are listed so far, covering emerging names through to established leads. For anyone hiring, the value is in the curation. It's not an open marketplace with thousands of profiles to wade through. It's closer to a well kept roster, the kind of list a good producer keeps in a spreadsheet and doesn't share. ## The editorial side The site is more than a list of profiles. Insights runs interviews, opinion and inspiration pieces, and they're good. A recent favorite is their conversation with Koketso Matabane, a South African commercial director, about authentic filmmaking, telling grounded stories in 20 seconds and working her way through the boys' club of directing. Other recent pieces cover the Black creatives behind well known album covers and why the best World Cup campaigns do more than look cool. There's also Black Creative News, a running feed of openings, prizes, festivals and appointments across art, design, film and advertising. It's a handy way to keep up with what's happening in the community without following fifty accounts. ## Joining For creatives, a basic Network profile is free, with no expiry. You get a ready-made portfolio page with a showreel, five images, a bio and one link, which is useful if you don't have a website or are tired of maintaining one. Network+ is $7 a month. It adds up to 20 images, more detail on your experience and focus, a verified badge, a featured listing in the directory, direct contact from clients and discounts in their store. ## Heads up At 300-plus creatives, the directory is still growing, so for some cities and niches you'll find only a handful of people, or none yet. It's best treated as a starting point for a search, alongside referrals, rather than the only place you look. It's also worth knowing that featured listings come with the paid tier, so when you're hiring, look past the top of the page too. ## Who it's for Producers, agencies and brands who want to look beyond their usual contacts for their next job. Creative directors building a team. Black creatives who want a simple, good looking portfolio and a community that actively puts their work in front of clients. And anyone who reads interviews for the craft talk; the Insights section is worth a bookmark on its own. Browse by your city first. There's a good chance you'll find someone brilliant you've never heard of. [Visit blackcreativenetwork.com ↗](https://blackcreativenetwork.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/fockups/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Fockups (https://fockups.com/) # What if your mockup is focked up? *Mockups · 4 min read* Most mockups live in a very nice world. The poster hangs perfectly flat in a spotless station. The business card rests on marble next to a flawless cappuccino. The phone floats in soft light against a clean backdrop. It's aspirational, and after the hundredth one, a bit hard to believe. Fockups is the other world. It's a series of "f*cked up mockups" that show your design the way it will actually end up: a banner peeling off a construction fence, a poster that's been rained on, a flag that's seen better days. The line on the site is "Because the world isn't as perfect as many mockups pretend." It was made by Wytze Hoogslag, a Dutch graphic designer and art director and co-founder of the Amsterdam studio Thansk. He photographed every scene himself, the first pack around Amsterdam, which is why they look so real. They are. ## What's in the packs There are two releases, and each one is a set of Photoshop files with smart objects, so you drop your artwork in the usual way. The first Fockups has eight: a business card, a phone, a beach flag, a flag on a pole, a billboard, A1 and A3 posters, and a roll-up banner. Fockups 2 adds ten more: a highway billboard, a 100 x 70 cm flag, an A2 poster triptych, A0, bus shelter and MUPI street posters, a banner on a construction site (that's the one at the top of this article), a bottle label, a presentation in front of an audience and, yes, a urinal ad. The conditions are the point. Wind, rain, time, graffiti, and what the site calls human stupidity. Posters get torn, banners flap loose, things get stuck on crooked. ## Why you'd use it Partly because it's funny, and a good laugh in a presentation never hurts. But there's a practical side too. A design that still reads when it's half torn off a fence is a design that works in the street. Putting your poster into a Fockup is a quick stress test for contrast, hierarchy and how much of it survives when things go wrong. It's also great for social posts and case studies. Everyone has seen the perfect billboard mockup. A slightly wrecked one gets a second look. ## The pricing Both packs are sold through FilterGrade, with personal, commercial and extended licenses. The first pack lists at $16 and Fockups 2 at $18, and both are often on sale. ## Heads up These are a bit of fun, not a full mockup toolkit. You're working with a fixed set of scenes, and some of them, like the urinal, won't suit every client deck. For polished, adjustable presentation mockups with real materials, LiveSurface is the better tool. Each scene is a real photo too, so the angle, crop and damage are what they are. If your artwork doesn't suit the composition, there's not much you can do beyond picking another one. ## Who it's for Poster and campaign designers who want to show work in the real world. Studios looking for a lighter way to present ideas. Anyone who has ever seen their beautiful print job six weeks later, faded and flapping, and laughed so they didn't cry. Pick up the first pack, drop in your latest poster and see how it holds up. [Visit fockups.com ↗](https://fockups.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/its-nice-that/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: It's Nice That (https://www.itsnicethat.com/) # It's Nice That is still the best way to start a creative day *Creative & Design · 5 min read* Some sites you visit for a reason. It's Nice That is one you visit out of habit, usually with a coffee, usually before you've properly started work. You open it to check one thing and twenty minutes later you've read about a risograph studio, a stop-motion director and a type designer you'd never heard of before breakfast. That's kind of the point. It's been running since 2007, out of an office on Old Street in London, and it covers pretty much everything creative people make: graphic design, illustration, photography, animation, fashion, architecture, advertising, film. It pulls in over 8 million readers a month now, which makes it one of the biggest creative publications around, but it still reads like it's put together by people who actually care about the work. ## What's on there The site is split into four broad areas, and they're worth knowing because they read quite differently. **Projects and creatives** is the bread and butter. Short features on new work, with plenty of images and a few paragraphs on who made it and why. This is where most of the discovery happens. **Insights and opinion** is where the longer thinking lives. Industry trends, essays, interviews that go a bit deeper than "tell us about your process." **Advice and resources** is the practical stuff. Pricing, portfolios, pitching, how to survive your first year freelancing. Genuinely useful if you're early in your career, and a decent sanity check if you're not. **Culture and lifestyle** is the loosest section, and sometimes the most fun. Music, books, the things creative people get obsessed with when they're not working. ## Why it's still worth your time The big thing It's Nice That does well is range. A lot of design sites end up showing you the same twenty studios on rotation. It's Nice That has a real knack for finding people early, often students or recent grads, before they're everywhere. If you want to know who's going to be doing interesting work in a couple of years, this is a good place to look. The writing is also a notch above most. Features are short but they're not lazy. There's usually a line or two in there that tells you something about the work you wouldn't have picked up from the images alone. And it's broad enough that it keeps you out of your own lane. If you're a brand designer, reading about an animator's process or a photographer's lighting setup does more for your thinking than another rebrand case study. ## Beyond the site It's Nice That is part of Residence, a wider network of creative businesses, which is why a few related things sit around it: - **Creative Lives in Progress** focuses on careers and emerging talent (it's in the Stash directory too). - **If You Could Jobs** is the creative jobs board, and one of the better ones if you're hiring or looking. - **Nicer Tuesdays** is their long-running live event series, with creatives talking through their work in front of an audience. There are also a handful of newsletters if you'd rather have it come to you. ## Heads up Because it covers so much, it can feel a bit scattered if you're after something specific. It's a browsing site, not a reference library. If you need every packaging project from the last five years, you're better off somewhere like Dieline. It also leans towards the UK and Europe. That's not a knock, the coverage is global, but you'll notice the London perspective now and then. ## Who it's for Anyone in a creative job who wants to stay curious. Students and grads looking for a sense of what's out there. Art directors hunting for illustrators and photographers. Anyone who's felt their taste going a bit stale and needs a shake-up. Make it your first tab of the morning for a week. Worst case, you've read some good things. Best case, you've found your next collaborator. [Visit itsnicethat.com ↗](https://www.itsnicethat.com/) --- URL: https://stash.cool/articles/jitter/ Published: 2026-09-28 Author: Steve Salgado About: Jitter (https://jitter.video/) # Jitter is the motion tool for people who don't do motion *Tools · 5 min read* If you've ever needed a logo to fade in and ended up losing an afternoon to After Effects tutorials, this one's for you. Jitter is a motion design tool that runs in your browser. You pull in your designs, animate them on a timeline, and export. That's more or less the whole pitch, and for a lot of day-to-day work it's all you need. Social posts, product demos, a little UI transition to drop into a case study. The stuff that doesn't justify booking a motion designer but still looks a bit flat sitting there as a static PNG. It's been around for a few years now, and Jitter says over 20,000 creative teams use it. Chances are some of the animated posts in your feed this week were made in it. ## Getting started The Figma import is the reason most people stick around. You bring frames across and the layers come with them, grouped and named the way you left them. No rebuilding, no exporting a hundred assets. If your file is tidy, you can be animating within a couple of minutes. If it isn't, well, this is a good excuse to clean it up. If you'd rather not start from nothing, there are 400-odd free templates made by the Jitter team and other designers. Logo reveals, device mockups, text animations, that kind of thing. They're genuinely useful for figuring out timing, even if you end up changing everything else. ## The bits worth knowing about **Animated components.** Build something once and reuse it across a file. Edit the original and every copy updates. Sounds boring until someone asks for the button to be a different color on every frame of a 30-second video. **The pen tool.** You can draw shapes and morph one into another, and move things along curved paths instead of straight lines. Small thing, big difference. Straight-line movement is the fastest way to make something look cheap. **Gradients, blurs, blend modes.** All animatable. This is where Jitter starts to feel less like a template machine and more like an actual design tool. **Fonts.** There are 1,500-plus built in, so kinetic type experiments don't turn into a licensing detour. **Audio and video.** You can drop in music and footage and time things to the track, which does a lot of heavy lifting for launch videos. **Export.** Video, GIF and Lottie, and you can batch export a pile of sizes at once. Lottie is the one to pay attention to if you work on product. It's lightweight, stays sharp and developers generally won't complain about it. ## The AI stuff It's there, and it's handled with a bit more restraint than most tools right now. You can turn a still image into video, generate effects from a text prompt, and use what they call Superagents to spin out variations of layouts and motion. Honestly, the more useful features sit next to it. Magic Import, auto-resize and auto-translate mean one approved animation can become every size and language a campaign needs without anyone rebuilding it by hand. Not exciting. Very handy the week before a launch. ## Heads up It isn't After Effects, and it's not pretending to be. If you're doing proper character animation, heavy compositing or anything with a particle system, you'll hit the ceiling pretty quickly. That work still belongs to motion designers, and fair enough. It's also a browser app, so a big file on a patchy connection can get sluggish. Worth knowing before you're presenting off café wifi. ## Who should use it Brand designers who want their identities to move a bit. Product designers mocking up transitions. Social teams who need fifteen versions of the same thing by Thursday. Founders making their own launch video because the budget ran out. There's a free plan, so the easiest way to find out if it fits is to open a Figma file, pick one frame and try to make one thing move nicely. Most people know within about twenty minutes. [Visit jitter.video ↗](https://jitter.video/)