Our lockdown creative challenge – aren’t today’s teens amazing?!

Back at the beginning of lockdown we came up with a plan to help teens fill their time, get creative and achieve something during lockdown that they’d be able to look back on with pride.

We invited submissions of blog posts, illustrations and greetings card designs and offered everyone who submitted an entry the option of full acknowledgement and support of their participation on UCAS forms, CVs and application forms. The lucky winners of our challenge also received an Equipp gift voucher plus the gift of their choice from a collection put together from some fab small businesses we know and love.

We were blown away (although not at all surprised; this generation of young people can do ANYTHING) by the talent that shone through all the work that was submitted. Particularly in the articles sent in for consideration for our blog – there are some brilliantly talented, insightful and thoughtful minds out there.

If you missed the articles that were published, you won’t regret taking a few minutes to catch up with them. We are so proud of being able to publish Sophie’s reaction to being thrust into lockdown, Isobel’s take on how months of lockdown was affecting her mental health and Mia’s series of three articles on teenage relationships:

We also invited submissions of illustrations and greetings card designs, and suggested the subject of a symbolic visualisation of a bird – representing freedom, and spreading your wings. We’re mildly obsessed with birds right now, with our gorgeous little hummingbird appearing in our logo and on T-shirts and sweatshirts…

We were sent some incredible designs, but the illustration that caught our eye was one that was sent in right at the very end. We love everything about this beautiful bird by Hannah Skews – the colours, the feeling of lightness, freedom and movement, and the subtle hearts on the wings. A massive well done to Hannah; a greetings card with her design is currently at the printers and will be available to buy very soon.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who sent us their work to consider. We are so full of admiration for how pretty much every single teenager we know, heard of or read about has made lockdown a time to grow, learn new skills, develop and simply be amazing; our initiative is just one example of their awesome efforts.

The lockdown challenge has reinforced just how much we love working with young people too; this definitely won’t be the last creative challenge we organise. In the meantime, if you have an idea, project, blog post or design that you’d like to discuss with us, send us an email at info@equipp.co.uk or DM us on Instagram @equippthem. We’d love to hear from you!

Louise & Anna x