Hello, Friday! Fun fact… Openness to new experience is a common personality trait in creative types. In this study, openness to experience, over neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, was found to be particularly related to creative personalities. This isn’t surprising when you consider the crazy experiences artists are often willing to go through for their work.

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Together with Beducated

In today’s edit 👇

• Latest news

• Are we seeing the end of Instagram?

• The importance of leveling up your love and sex life…

• A free platform invites the creative community to help ‘Give a Face’ to the war in Ukraine

• Discovery → Tools for creative freelancers

• Balenciaga’s Fashion Week homage to Ukraine 

• Job board → latest job opportunities

• And some extras…

• Pantone and artist Polygon1993 turn colour of the year into an NFT. The venture marks Pantone’s first foray into the realm of NFTs.

• The diminishing returns of streaming’s glut of grifters. From The Dropout to Inventing Anna, nothing represents this era of television better than the prevalence of scammer programming.

• A genius Twitter bot is calling out companies that post platitudes for International Women’s Day. The bot also highlights organizations that pay employees almost equitably.

• Spice DAO wants to be clear about one thing: it is not filming Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. They spent $3 million on a Dune script bible - now what?

• The Recording Academy is celebrating its upcoming Grammy Awards with the launch of an exclusive NFT collection. Fans can get a free NFT as part of the deal, one of which has a “Golden Ticket” prize that grants the bearer an all-inclusive trip to the 64th awards April 3 in Las Vegas.

Together with Beducated

How to Level up Your Sex & Love Life

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That is exactly why we'd like to tell you about Beducated - a unique platform that gives access to 80+ Online Courses from the world's top Relationships & Sex experts. Whether you are struggling with finding love, building sexual confidence, exploring your sexual preferences, or simply would like to spice up your sex life - Beducated is here to help!

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Are we seeing the end of Instagram?

A 2021 survey from financial services firm Piper Sandler found that only 22 percent of youth said Instagram was their favourite social media platform, coming in third after Snapchat and TikTok. Back in 2015, the same survey showed Instagram as the preferred social media app among youth, with 33 percent of participants claiming it as their favourite. In that time, the platform has undergone significant changes.

Just a recap on the multiple changes in the past five years.

• In 2016, Instagram introduced in-feed shopping and switched from a chronological feed to an algorithm.

• In 2017, the app introduced recommended posts.

• And in the years since, Instagram has become more about e-commerce and less about sharing photos with your friends.

• Today, our feeds are inundated with sponsored content and recommended posts — and a photo disappears as soon as you like it, making it hard to see what your friends are posting.

The updates to Instagram are so unpopular that Instagram announced it is working on bringing back the option to have a chronological feed.

Instagram wants to do everything; short-form video content, shopping, lived and Snapchat-inspired stories— but it's losing sight of why users liked it in the first place: It's a destination to curate your own aesthetic and, therefore, your identity.

The influx of photo dumps and the desperate attempts by Instagram to stay relevant are the writing on the wall that the platform is on its way out as a social media platform for young people. It’s no longer a collage of lifestyle highlights and aesthetic inspo, but trying too hard to be the cool kid that does everything. Furthemore, it is only the app features that have changed but the tone of the app, arguably influenced by TikTok. Three years ago the goal was a perfectly curated grid filtered to death. Now, photo dumps claiming users are “too cool and having too much fun to stop and take a perfect picture”.

In one video, @cozyakili explains how posting casually on Instagram is more curated than people think. He likens casual Instagram to reality television because they are both hyperreal performances. Posting casual photo dumps on Instagram makes your life an aesthetic even more than before.

At this point, we are questioning when the time will come when we stop opening the app all together? Where are we to go? What effect will this have on photography with younger apps favouring video formats almost solely? Time will only tell.

A Free Platform Invites the Creative Community to Help ‘Give a Face’ to the War in Ukraine

“Our weapon is our truth” – President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

Creatives for Ukraine is a new platform that encourages the global creative community to share photographs, images, illustrations and art to “give a face” to the War in Ukraine. 

Creatives For Ukraine hopes to address this issue and go a step further by providing a platform where these images are available to download at a higher resolution, so they can be spread more easily.

Some of the first to join the platform include famous Lithuanian creators Karolis Strautniekas and Eglė Plytnikaitė, whose work has graced the pages of several international publications like The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vice, The Independent, and more. Illustrator Strautniekas, whose interpretation of Putin's portrait has already circulated widely on social media, says it’s important for him to show his support with the tool he uses best: an illustration. "I think today we should use whatever power lies in our hands to stand up against violence and tyranny," he says. "They say it's better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times. What about seeing something a thousand times? Maybe that would reinforce even bigger support from the world."

Illustrations shared on the Creatives For Ukraine platform are open for individual users and media outlets all around the world to use when they need to illustrate the situation in Ukraine. The platform will not have any commercial use but will ask to credit creatives if work is shared elsewhere. You can submit your work via the platform. The site also encourages visitors to donate to Blue/Yellow, a humanitarian charity founded in Lithuania to support Ukraine.

Discovery

Tools for creative freelancers

• Morelli → Creating a sticky homepage template

• Hypotenuse AI → Write content in 5 minutes with AI

• BugHerd → Visual feedback, like sticky notes on your website. The best tool to collect, organise and act on website feedback.

• Causal → Causal provides a new way to perform calculations, visualise data, and communicate with numbers.

• Morelli → Selling your services with this testimonial template

• DirectIQ → A tool that is better than Mailchimp for email marketing

• Webrowse → A Google Chrome extension for co-browsing websites with your teammates and easy collaboration via a shared browsing window during your online meetings

Balenciaga’s Fashion Week Homage to Ukraine

For many of us, this season’s Fashion Month has felt bittersweet. While we’re all excited to see the latest collections accompanied by a pregnant Rihanna and Euphoria’s fashion favourite Alexa Demie sitting front row, the tone felt almost…inappropriate. 

Of all creative director’s this season, Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia was specifically triggered by the recent and present war in Ukraine and helped us answer whether fashion truly matters in light of everything that is going on right now. 

The usual catwalk soundtrack was replaced by a poem read aloud by Demna in Ukrainian and a note was left on each of the 525 seats, along with a T-shirt in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, said that while “fashion week feels like some kind of an absurdity”, to cancel the show would have meant “surrendering to the evil that has already hurt me so much for almost 30 years”.

Continue reading → wishu

• Check out Time’s picks for the top inventions of 2021, including robots, toys, apps, home goods, and medical breakthroughs.

• Heardle (yes, another Wordle spinoff) challenges you to guess a song in as few seconds as possible.

• Researchers say that accepting emotional discomfort as a sign of progress in certain situations can increase your motivation.

• Bundle for Ukraine is a collection of 900+ indie games available for a minimum donation of $10. Thus far, it’s raised $3m+ for charities providing relief to Ukraine.

• To watch → The Andy Warhol Diaries: the inner life of an artist no one really knew. In The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new six-episode Netflix documentary executive-produced by Ryan Murphy, the familiar details of the artist's life are mostly covered within the first hour.

 Featured job openings 💸

1. Farfetch: Freelance Traditional Chinese Content Writer (Remote)

2. Axis Studios: Environment Artist (VFX) (Bristol)

3. Red Sky Productions: Shooting PD (Glasgow)

4. Global: Creative Producer (Manchester)

5. Channel 4: Junior Video Editor, 4Studio (Leeds)

6. The Guardian: Subeditor (London)

7. TikTok: Product Marketing Manager (London/Remote)

8. Second Home: Marketing Coordinator (London)

9. Barbican Centre: Marketing Assistant (Visual Arts) (London)

10. WarnerMedia: Associate Producer (London)

Browse more open roles, or add your own, at The Creative Lead job board.

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