In our third annual Ideas Report, published in early December, we took the pulse of our community. Out of 35,000 responses, we sought to understand how creative people generated and developed ideas in a highly unusual year, all while reckoning with a global pandemic. It was a year of massive contrasts. The results were striking. While many respondents reported having more creative ideas than ever before, intense doubt and a toll on mental health was a prevailing theme for others.

To show the impact of a year of chaos on the creative mind, we had to think outside the box.

We wanted to engage WeTransfer’s global community to build an understanding of how the uncertainty and doubt plaguing our world impacted creativity.

Challenge: Engage audiences without the intimacy of in person events or a physical report

Objectives: Build awareness of WeTransfer’s deep connection to creative professionals and drive engagement.

Empathising with the good, bad, and messy parts of ideas has been a part WeTransfer since day one.

From a design standpoint, we wanted this year’s report to have multiple entry points, allowing people to take in the information in different ways. We landed on three ways in––Read, Watch, and Play.

In the Read section, we showed five key findings as cards that readers could open and close, like flipping through a report page. We were inspired by economy-focused newspapers such as the Financial Times. It was important to have the information and data feel unencumbered, so referencing a brutalist approach to design felt appropriate.

For the Watch section, we interviewed five industry leaders who shared their advice for dealing with creative blocks, and we asked how they harnessed doubt in a game-changing year. The talks were candid, honest, and intimate.

The inspiration for this section was real-life cinema. We wanted to make it feel like something you would lean back to watch and enjoy. We designed the page to reflect the speakers’ candidness and openness, using big, bold typography to emphasize the five personal mantras.

Lastly, a game to present the survey questions as an interactive journey and wandering experience.

We asked visitors how the pandemic affected them on a professional and personal level. As they advanced through five stages, their “aura” formed a shareable summary, or mood spectrum, of their past year.

Throughout our game we featured a marble, a protagonist meant to encapsulate the visitor in an abstract sense. We were attracted to the childlike symbolism of marbles, and the innocence and playfulness in rolling them. The marble evolved along with its aura over the course of the journey––a sort of crystal ball that absorbed each player’s past, present, and future based on their answers.