You are reading Creativerly, the weekly digest about creativity and productivity-boosting tools and resources, combined with useful insights, articles, and findings from the fields of design and tech. The newsletter built for the creative community.

Hey and welcome to issue 135 👋

I am back from some much-needed holidays, and oh my it felt so good to log off, relax, and spent some time away from social networks and all the noise which keeps delegating our lives. Although I managed to completely log off from any social networks and therefore also done now work for Creativerly, I was already looking forward to getting back to writing this newsletter.

Taking breaks regularly is also important to gain back some motivation. I am fully recharged and ready to get back to focussed work on Creativerly. Over the upcoming weeks, there will be some new announcements that I can not wait to share with you. But for now, I am happy to announce that I am back gathering and creating only the best content for you.

Let's get into it!

If you have recommendations or feedback, drop me an email or a tweet. For now, enjoy the newsletter!  🥰

Apps, Software, Tools

MeisterNote →

MeisterNote is the newest addition to the awesome productivity suite by MeisterLabs. After creating MindMeister, a mind-mapping tool for teams, and MeisterTask, an intuitive and secure task manager, MeisterLabs are entering the note-taking space with MeisterNote. As all MeisterLabs products, MeisterNote is aimed especially at teams. MeisterNote gives teams the possibility to craft, write, and organize information collaboratively, within a beautiful interface.

To keep all your notes structured and organized you can create workspaces within MeisterNote and share them with your team, so you can create content, documentation, and notes together by using content blocks in over 15 different styles. MeisterNote delivers powerful content creation and editing capabilities which make it the perfect solution if you are looking for a tool to create a knowledge base, meeting management, internal communication, project documentation, and much more.

MeisterNote is based on so-called content blocks which make it possible to format text as headers, to-do lists, images, code snippets, and more. There are even many different ways like color and formatting options to further customize your notes. To make MeisterNote even more powerful, you can seamlessly integrate it with MeisterTask to quickly turn all your notes into actions. This integration makes it possible to convert any kind of content blocks to actionable tasks, or link tasks in notes to provide context and clarity for everyone. But this is not the only integration MeisterNote is offering. Currently, there are over 20 different integrations available, so you can connect the tools you use already and further boost your productivity.

As already mentioned, MeisterNote is ready for collaboration with your colleagues and team members. If you need help in improving your internal documentation, organization, and productivity, MeisterNote is the tool to use. Besides all of that, MeisterNote is designed and created with privacy in mind. MeisterNote is a Trusted Cloud certified service and fully EU-GDPR compliant. All our products are hosted in the European Union with servers located in an ISO 27001-certified data center in Frankfurt, Germany. MeisterNote is available completely for free within the Basic Plan which includes 5 workspaces, unlimited notes, note editing and customizing and more. There are also Pro and Business Plans.

Weje →

Weje is a super easy-to-use all-in-one online collaborative workspace, where you can free your creativity and visualize all your ideas and projects. No matter if you want to use ordinary sticky notes or full-fledged kanban boards, Weje is here to assist you while you are working on all your projects. Weje is the perfect companion if you are looking for a tool for brainstorming sessions, mind mapping, meeting notes, or if you want to structure your todo's within kanban boards.

Weje is a great tool for everyone who likes to collect information online, add notes and ideas to it, set goals and remember tasks, all in one place. Weje gives you the power to structure and organize everything so you can present your libraries of knowledge in countless different ways. Everything you create within Weje is ready for collaboration out of the box. Share your information, notes, tasks, sticky notes, with friends, teammates, or colleagues, start working on projects together, and thanks to Weje's seamless synchronization you can always be sure to be up to date whenever something changed.

At the core, Weje is based on a digital whiteboard which is your creative canvas where you can place sticky notes by simply dragging and dropping content, group sticky cards into well-organized kanban boards, or add any common file type to the digital board and preview them in the workspace. No matter if you are a student, designer, marketer, educator, writer, or knowledge management addict, make sure to give Weje a try as there are several use cases, ranging from brainstorming, online whiteboard, moodboard, and much more, where Weje shows how powerful it is.

Sprout →

Sprout is a lovely tool to create a virtual space to meet, chat, and simply hang out with your favorite people or colleagues. Sprout creates a virtual space for you. When you enter that virtual space you can pull up a so-called facedock which is a flexible, resizable, rearrangeable frame for your video chat.

Once you are within your virtual space you can not only pull up a facedock you can rather drop in images, discuss documents and notes, or just hang out and talk. Sprout also gives you the possibility to decorate and set up your space for all kinds of occasions, no matter if you are planning a work meeting, or an after-work hangout, Sprout is a place to co-create, co-work, or just chill together. If you ever wanted to bring a more personal and cozy feeling to your meetings and if you ever wanted to have a personal virtual space to create, work, and hang out, Sprout is a tool you should definitely take a look at.

You can think of Sprout as a shared digital canvas where you and your friends are free to create and let your creativity flow. Joining a Sprout meeting is super easy. You can enter any meeting straight from your browser, no account, no sign up needed, simply click the Sprout link shared with you and you are ready to go.

Doodle Ipsum →

I am always impressed whenever I see a new product launched my Pablo Stanley, creator of the superb illustration collection called Blush. His newest tool is an extension to the Blush library and it is called Doodle Ipsum. Inspired by the classic Lorem Ipsum, Doodle Ipsum automatically generates placeholder illustrations with a simple line of code.

Pablo Stanley got the initial idea for Doodle Ipsum while working together with developers, as he realized there is no simple tool to get placeholder illustrations. Existing libraries were time-consuming, and mostly just focused on photos. Therefore, he decided to build and launch Doodle Ipsum, which solves this problem perfectly. Using Doodle Ipsum is super easy, all you have to do is choosing an illustration style first (either flat, abstract, hand-drawn, outline, or random styles), then you customize the placeholder illustration by choosing a background color, pick your desired dimensions, apply effects (if needed), copy your image URL or use the embed code, and then straight paste it on your site's code, and you are done. Simply as that.

You can use those illustrations for any kind of use cases, websites, landing pages, mockups, web apps, or whatsoever. Doodle Ipsum is a super intuitive tool to save time and boost your creativity.

Mental Wealth

➢ How to Get Motivated and Take Action – “Most people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional inspiration. People only become motivated to study for the exam when they’re afraid of the consequences. People only pick up and learn that instrument when they feel inspired by the people they can play for. And we’ve all slacked off for lack of motivation before. Especially in times where we shouldn’t. We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional desire to accomplish something.”

➢ A More Self-Accepting Life – “One of the ways in which we can accelerate, and keep faith with, change is to look forward to a time when it has occurred and anticipate what it might be like to have made progress with our psyches. Here is some of what we might expect when we have come to lead more self-accepting lives: We would not be inordinately pleased with ourselves or bask in an impression of our own wondrousness.”

➢ No, standardization doesn’t stifle creativity – “Complaining about the maturation of digital design is all the rage in the UX world right now. Years ago we started noticing how all websites look the same due to the standardizaton of UX best practices and data-driven design. Now we’re complaining that everyone’s design process is the same — or simply bad, like design sprints) — which results in designers turning into replaceable commodities with little room for creativity and diversity. I’m not immune to jumping on this bandwagon — it’s healthy to critique our industry from time to time. I’ve written about how data-driven design is killing our instincts, some methods for how to stop designing the same old stuff, and how designers need more time to play.”

➢ The new disruptors: Gen Z and the future of work – “Millennials were the first generation to disrupt traditional ways of working and introduce a more purposeful approach. Realizing that the “move fast, break things” mindset of pre-2008 was no longer sustainable, they began to fix it. But for a generation–now the largest demographic in the workplace–that began entering the workforce in the early 21st century, hangovers from the previous era remained. While flexibility no doubt increased as technology accelerated throughout the 2010s, businesses’ cultures of presenteeism and profit persisted.”

Appendix

➢ ICYMI

Apple held their long-awaited September event where they announced several new tech including the new iPhone 13 which will cost you in the maxed-out pro version a whopping $1800, pure insanity. If you want to get more insights about all the new products announce within the September event, you can check out this great summary by iMore.

➢ Quick Bits

First iPhone 13 pre-orders now shipping ahead of Friday release / Google is getting caught in the antitrust net / TikTok faces privacy investigations by EU watchdog / VanMoof raises $128M to become ‘most funded e-bike company in the world’ / Telegram emerges as new dark web for cyber criminals / Instagram CEO hit with backlash after comparing the app to car safety

Twitter thoughts

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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