How creativity has helped us connect with a global community

Over the past three months, thousands upon thousands of people have taken part in our partnership with Today at Apple: New World. Across the 21 Virtual Studio sessions we’ve hosted and the five Creative Guides we’ve published, our audience has produced a breathtaking array of artworks, covering every creative discipline from illustration to photography, graphic design to animation.

As our partnership draws to a close, we want to celebrate just a fraction of this mighty collection, bursting with originality and character, which has been shared on the #CreativeNewWorld hashtag across social media. So, we got in touch with dozens of participants, both professional creatives and keen amateurs, to learn more about their pieces, but also to understand how the New World programme has featured in their lives over the past 12 weeks.

A number of lessons emerge from these conversations. For many, the live sessions have created a sense of connection to a wider, global creative community, during a time when many of us have been unable to gather together in person. For others, the simple act of creating an original work, taking inspiration and motivation from an experienced designer or artist, has offered up a much-needed moment of light – or perhaps even just a moment of light relief. And for others, these sessions have provided an opportunity to process some of the memories of the past 12 months, as well as a chance to look ahead to something brighter: the prospect of rebuilding a new and better world.

Read on to hear from these participants, to learn more about their experiences and to see their artworks. It’s worth saying, though, that this is by no means a comprehensive gallery of all the works produced across the series. To view that, we encourage you to head over to Instagram and follow the hashtag #CreativeNewWorld.

Emma Harvey from Glasgow joined the Studio Dumbar session on animation, which culminated in the audience collaborating on the creation of a “new world map” made out of countless individuals animated tiles (the final map can be seen directly above and is available to view here). The session fell in the third week of February, when Emma says she “was starting to feel particularly stuck and burnt out”. The session offered her “the space to be creative whilst not feeling too pressured to produce anything perfect”.

Similarly, Emma Ewert, who divides their time between London and Geneva, told us that the session run by the artist duo Thukral & Tagra helped them to “look at what impact lockdown had on me personally and creatively”, during a time when they had limited access “to creative environments and creative peers”.

At the end of March, Joel Gethin Lewis and Claire Cook from design studio Universal Everything ran a session looking at hope and connecting that emotion to the body. Claire’s sister Lucy was in the audience that evening, when Claire asked: “In a time like now, what gives you hope?” Lucy recalls: “My thoughts turned to children and how we need to make them happy right now. They, and we, need some fun and playfulness to recover from this strange and sad year we have all shared.” Her creation, a costume made from her son’s pyjamas and dozens of fluffy pom-poms, was just what we all needed to see.

Other sessions were more about escapism and reconnecting with the outside world. In his session in early March, the Mumbai-based artist Sameer Kulavoor encouraged participants to look with fresh eyes at their surroundings. He started by going through his extensive portfolio, covering everything from graphic prints and books to oil paintings on canvas. Afterwards, he set the audience a brief: to create a collage from their own photo library reimagining their environment.

Amogh Bhatnagar was in the audience, dialling in from Gwalior, India, and found the session helpful in processing a year of intense change. “In 2019, I moved to the city of Ahmedabad to study design,” he tells us. “In less than a year, I had to move back home because of the pandemic. The artwork is literally a collection of objects that really defined the spirit of the city to me.” In his collage, we see streets, a picture of his college and the city’s markets. “I didn’t have much of a cultural connection with the city,” he says, “so my memories of the time there are rooted deeply in the materiality of it all.”

Lorren Allen also attended, dialling in from Bristol in the UK. “I loved hearing Sameer talk about his process and how he builds up a catalogue of images to work from wherever he goes,” she says. When it came time for the hands-on part of the session, Lorren’s mind went quickly to the lockdowns her city has witnessed over the past 12 months. “I love nature and when looking through my photos, I found a lot of landscapes, animals and plants, which are the things that have really helped me find calm in this past year,” she explains. “I wanted to create an image of the perfect place to explore, combining lots of beautiful places I’ve been recently and imagining what it would feel like to be there.”

Her final artwork contains a drawing of a ballerina (done by her boyfriend). “I like to think that I am her,” she reflects, “dancing along through a pink-tinted landscape, on my way to meet a couple of ducks, with nothing else on my mind.”

“Studio Nari is a long-term design crush,” says Magdalena. “Also, lately, I have been trying to experiment with typography and have been learning to have more fun with it, to not take it too seriously, as I was taught at university.” It’s easy to overlook the importance of play, simply experimenting without pressure. “My aim was to create something more intuitive, not to overthink it during research,” says Magdalena. “And it was great to see how you can play with type, just enjoying the process without minding all the typography rules, since you have no time to think about them!”

Alberto Santomé in Barcelona tackled one of the other Creative Guides, led by the photographer Camila Falquez. Alberto says they found Camila’s work immediately “really exciting”; reading over the Guide in full gave them the “creative trigger to set up a still life with my lovely home harvest of anemone flowers”. They had only planted them a few weeks before and, with the weather starting to get warmer in Catalonia, they had just started to bloom. “Just two flowers had come up early and beautiful, so I thought to create something with them as a tribute.”

Konstantinos Trichas’ session revolved around the sheer joy of postcards and had us all yearning to travel again. But more than that, it created a real feeling of togetherness. Maria Mylona joined the session from Athens, in Konstantinos’ native Greece, and created a series of three postcards representing her home city and her own connections to it. The session came after a tough few days for Maria personally and she was surprised by how connected the session and the creative brief made her feel. “I didn’t know how a virtual community could help you feel happier and more creative in harsh moments,” she says. “I felt my chest opening to the world and my community.”

The New World programme has clearly played an important role in keeping people connected, inspired and creatively motivated during an ineffably difficult time. Yet one of its key missions was also to teach creative skills to help us all in rebuilding a new and better post-pandemic world. Looking ahead to the future, this notion of community is perhaps the most important legacy that New World could ever hope to have – reminding us all that there is such a thing as a global creative community and that it is supportive and strong.