Welcome to 2025 & How to get good at anything creative

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 307 👋

Welcome to 2025, happy new year. The new year is already almost a week old, I hope you all had a great start into 2025. I have a lot on my plate right now, which is also the reason I had a hard time figuring out where to start, heading into the new year. In the past, I found myself in such a situation multiple times, there were just too many things I wanted to work on at the same time. Instead of starting into the new demoralized by all the ideas and work, I began to plan things ahead and split everything up into smaller tasks, and especially separate the ones which are essential from others which are just improvements or enhancements and could come at a later stage. This helps me having a healthy relationship with all my side-projects. I also wrote about this topic on my personal blog in case you would like to get some more insights into it.

Speaking of my personal blog, my first two essential tasks for the new year were finishing up two blog posts and publishing them to my personal blog. They were essential tasks since they kind of act as reflection of the past year. The first post I published was my App Defaults 2024, a post I already published in 2023 showcasing the apps I use on daily or regular basis, inspired by the Hemispheric Views podcast. Since I made some changes to my toolstack throughout 2024, I decided to publish a new version of it, and provide some information regarding why I made the switch to specific apps. The second post was A selection of things I discovered in 2024. This post was inspired while I browsed through all the bookmarks I created throughout 2024. Instead of just leaving them be, I wanted to reflect a bit on the things I bookmarked, especially since I wanted to connect with my bookmarks more regularly. I might even create a dedicated page on my personal website, simply to keep track and share interesting, insightful, fun, and weird links I discover during browsing the web, researching, or getting lost in rabbit holes.

Over the upcoming days, I will slowly get back to my usual schedule working on all my projects, however, with the dedicated focus on tackling one thing after the other. As I am doing that, I kept this week's issue of Creativerly a bit shorter.

I hope you all had a great start into the new year, and I wish you only the best for days, weeks, and months ahead.

Fresh Updates & News

Polywork shutting down →

Polywork went viral during the period of 2021-22 by introducing a product that kind of was rivaling with LinkedIn. However, Polywork was way more than just a professional network. It gave users the possibility to connect with each other over passions and interests, build up on their professional identity, discover potential partners and co-founders, and create and share opportunities within your circle to collaborate on any kind of projects. The platform grew immensely, and in the short span of a single year, Polywork bagged over $40 million in funding through a Seed Round, Series A, and Series B according to Crunchbase.

Unfortunately, shortly after, Polywork did not manage to sustain their growth. After a product pivot, removing a lot of the features and functionality users seemed to enjoy most, Polywork focused on building a service that turned your LinkedIn profile into a personal website. But as Polywork is now shutting down, that did not seem as a viable path.

Mental Wealth

❯ A Year of Curiosity – “New technologies, new ways of working, new modes of communication… Each new year is a reminder that the world is changing faster than ever. And it can feel like it’s impossible to keep up.”

❯ The End of News – “Americans have record-low trust in the media. They’re reading traditional news less. Platforms, too, have broken up with news organizations, making it harder for them to attract readers to their stories. Many 20th-century media companies are outmoded in a landscape where independent sites, influencers, and podcasters are finding large, passionate audiences, especially among adults under 30. Surveying this landscape recently, my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, unsparingly, “The ‘Mainstream Media’ has already lost.””

❯ Future Web – “One day not that long ago, on a tram, my boiling frustrations with what the Web is becoming were particularly unbearable. Little rights, many wrongs. Is this what we’ll let it be?”

❯ How to get good at anything creative – “Creativity is often seen as a gift, something that can’t be taught or developed. But creative people know that, in reality, it takes much more than a spark of inspiration to create something great. It requires skills that are developed over time through persistent practice. But what exactly does it mean to develop skills? How can you move beyond the basics and avoid getting stuck?”

Do not miss out on this ...

❉ Experience the ultimate vector editor for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Get started with Amadine*.

❉ Think tasks, not apps. Setapp* is you one-stop subscription to solving every task on Mac and iPhone.

❉ Fathom is cookie-free, GDPR compliant, privacy-first website analytics software. Get $10 off your first invoice and a 7-day free trial when you use this link*.

These are paid promotions or affiliate links to support Creativerly. If you are interested in putting your tool, product, or resource in front of over 2000 creative minds, consider advertising in Creativerly and book a sponsor or classified ad spot. Find all the important information at creativerly.com/advertise.

Appendix

❯ ICYMI

I am currently lookin for my next role, my next adventure, my next challenge. I am a Product Designer driven by over a decade of design experience, and I spent more than half of it building and design user-centric products. You can find out more about my work and myself on my personal website. In case you know of any open roles for Product Designer/Sr. Product Designer, remote, preferable EMEA, please let me know. I also appreciate any referrals.

❯ Quick Bits

• Nvidia to open-source Run:ai, the software it acquired for $700M to help companies manage GPUs for AI (Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat)
• Remote Working Is Changing the Landscape of Entrepreneurship (Victor W. Hwang / Inc.)
• Bluesky and Threads showed us very different visions for a post-X future (Karissa Bell / Engadget)
• Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
• Facebook and Instagram Ads Push Gun Silencers Disguised as Car Parts (Dhruv Mehrotra / Wired)
• Later acquires social influencer app Mavely for $250M (Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat)
• Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks (Thomas Claburn / The Register)
• USB-C gets a bit more universal as the EU’s mandate goes into effect (Kevin Purdy / Ars Technica)
• Telegram introduces third-party verification and new search filters (Steve Dent / Engadget)
• Meta Deleted Its Controversial AI Profiles. Here’s Why. (Ben Sherry / Inc.)
• Venture fund founder sues PayPal, alleging racial discrimination (Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch)
• Californians Say X Blocked Them From Viewing Amber Alert About Missing 14-Year-Old (Kate Knibbs / Wired)
• How Elon Musk’s X became the global right’s supercharged front page (J Oliver Conroy / The Guardian)
• Tenable CEO Amit Yoran dies (Anthony Ha / TechCrunch)
• Nick Clegg is leaving Meta after 7 years overseeing its policy decisions (Karissa Bell / Engadget)

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

Support: Do you have a friend who is looking for inspiration, news about design, and useful tools and apps? Forward this newsletter to a friend or simply share this issue and show some support. You can also show some love by simply clicking the button down below and keep this newsletter a sustainable side-project by buying me a coffee. ☕️ 🥰

Some of the links in my newsletter and my blog posts are affiliate links. Those links are marked by an asterisk. If you buy something through the link, the product will not cost you anything more, but I will receive a small commission which not only supports Creativerly and my work but also helps me to keep this publication a sustainable side-project.

Creativerly is proudly published with Ghost*.