✏ Issue #503: Give Your Creativity Some Space, Micro Invest, Exciting New Tools for Designers, 7 Steps to Building a Personal Brand, and more…

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Creatives are under constant pressure to produce day-in, day-out. The repeated demands on our skills can result in lower quality work — forcing a design never works well. In this short post, Rafal Tomal offers seven simple tips for giving your creativity space, letting it breathe, and using the resulting calm to uncover new, interesting directions.

If you’ve got a startup on the boil, you’ll know how often it’s moved to a back-burner so you can earn a living. Micro Invest is an awesome idea for connecting solo founders with solo investors, with the aim of paying a developer a six-month salary to focus on their project full-time. Submit your MVP, and receive support and micro-investment.

Developing mobile apps is a highly competitive industry, made all the more difficult to break into because we are so precious about the utilities we download to our pricey devices. Streaming apps offer many of the functionalities of regular apps but without the need to install them on a device. Chris Stokel-Walker investigates.

Superpowered is a handy Mac app for managing your meetings and messages with a single click. It’s ideal for freelancers managing their own busy schedule. There is a free forever plan that integrates with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Around, and WebEx; the pro version integrates with Slack and starts at $10 per month.

Every month we publish this popular guide to the most exciting new tools and resources for designers and developers we’ve found on the web in the previous four weeks. September means school’s back in session, so most of the entries this month have a learning focus, but you’ll still find tons of cool stuff, including some awesome free fonts.

If you value developing and honing new skills, then you’ll love the idea of Omnicourse, a new audio-course platform that covers more than 100 topics. World-class instructors teach courses that range from 5-minute learnbites to 3-hour full courses that you can hear whenever you want. You can apply to join the beta now.

Your personal brand is a way to define yourself, mostly for yourself, but also as a way of connecting with the world. In this in-depth guide, Dayna Winter introduces seven steps to crafting your personal brand, beginning with an example of how to establish a personal brand statement and concluding with ways to nourish and maintain it.

Browsers are no longer used for simply surfing the web; in 2021, a web browser is a working app; for many professionals, a web browser is the working app where they perform most of their daily tasks. This revolution has led to a wealth of available plugins for super-charging workflow. awwwards looks at 15 of the best for Chrome.