Every year we craft a bespoke survey for our WeTransfer community. Each survey tends to be centred around a different theme—from what makes an idea worth pursuing to the impact of a pandemic on our creativity (shoutout 2020)—and includes a bunch of demographic questions so we can segment our findings by things like age, location, or creative field.

The survey is then linked to a WeTransfer wallpaper—one of those big background images you see on wetransfer.com—where we invite anyone who lands on the page to take part. This wallpaper runs for around four to six weeks, and during that time we’ll receive thousands of responses from hundreds of countries, painting a pretty strong picture of a global creative outlook.

Once the answers are in, we whip out the spreadsheets, dive into the data, and make note of any key insights or interesting trends. For example, the creative field most likely to get their best ideas in the bathroom (we’re looking at you Advertising), or the only place where booze actually increases creativity (cheers to that Japan).

As overarching narratives begin to emerge, we ask some of our creative friends to weigh in on the findings. Over the years, this has included superb insights from the likes of Roxane Gay, John Legend, and neurosurgical professor, Lu Chen.

The final challenge is to bring everything together in an informative yet engaging experience, visualising our findings in anything from short videos and animated graphs to personalized creative horoscopes. None of which would be possible without our disgustingly talented WeTransfer Studio and an outstanding collection of partners.