Hi.
It smells like spring in Vienna and I am looking forward to the weekend. The desk I am writing this newsletter from looks like this today.
Hello to all new subscribers: this newsletter is for curious marketers, content/web creators, and entrepreneurs. Content & tool curation as a service, that’s the mission. Expect stuff about social media, design, marketing, tech, and productivity (twice a month). Stay fresh! Rolf
🧠 Hand-Picked Content
Content Creation Process from start to finish (Blog, 30min)
Writing a great blog post looks like alchemy to outsiders, but successful content marketers rely on a well-engineered process. This guide is helpful if you want to start tuning your content creation process. More
Open DMs in Slack (Article, 5min)
Slack added a feature that allows anyone to send you direct messages in Slack without being part of your organization. You could, for example, add a “message me on Slack” link on your Twitter profile. After launch, this feature got heavily criticized. I will try it out, it sounds useful to me. More
Amazon Basics – a tempting option you should avoid (Video, 2min)
As tempting as the price looks, let’s think about the original creator of a product. We don’t want our lives to be only Amazon basic. More
Avoiding bad decisions (Blog, 3min)
“… five of the biggest reasons we make bad decisions.” More
🛠️ Tools & Apps & Services
Figma in 24 minutes (Video)
This step-by-step tutorial shows how to copy an already existing design in Figma, starting with basic steps: making figures, changing colors, and adding text. This will help to understand Figma’s features and possibilities, and to start creating something yourself. (BTW: I think having the basic Figma skills is something every marketer/creator will need in the future). More
Create/edit images in your browser
Question: Which tool do I use if I quickly need to modify an image? Like cropping, adding text, saving a PSD as a PNG, and so on. My answer: Photopea. Screenshot | More
Google Docs for the modern age
I love writing, editing, and reviewing text in Google Docs. But lately, it feels a bit outdated. That’s due to tools like Notion and similar alternatives. Slite caught my attention. It mixes the features for collaborative writing, knowledge sharing, integrates with many of the tools I already use. We are evaluating it at Fresh van Root right now as a replacement for some of the stuff we do in Google Docs. More
A fresh approach to forms creation
Tally is a cool new web app for creating forms. I like the way you can draft a form within minutes just by using your keyboard. Intuitive and powerful. More
Device mockup creation for marketers
Tired of searching for graphic file templates to create device mockups? Or asking a designer friend to create one for you? Mockup Studio might be the solution to this. More
Design background patterns for your next project
Haikei is a simple browser app for doing that. Download SVG or PNG. More
📣 Fresh van Root
The newsletter archive
I finally started working on the newsletter archive. The Mailchimp newsletter archive page will not win a design award. And it is not searchable. I want to change that and will slowly move the archive over to freshvanroot.com.
The audio companion for this newsletter
For the second time, I got on a call with Tom to discuss some stories of this newsletter. You can listen to the recording on capiche.fm. I am still not committing to do this for every episode, but I will continue experimenting with it. More
🔗 One More Link
Create a TikTok in one minute
It takes lots of practice to make it look easy. More
A meme turned into a club-house track
I like the bassline of this one. More