Current social networks and professional talent scouting platforms aren’t working for creative individuals. Online creative communities have broken apart and are dispersed across the internet, leaving the possibility for organic creative collaboration mostly impossible. Social networks have failed creative communities in favour of mass volumes of generic content, advertising and individual wealth.
As creatives, we currently need to spend countless hours on many different platforms just to build small, fleeting audiences, that get swept away onto a different account once you stop being active. Constantly posting and being favourable to platform algorithms IS NOT sustainable. It’s damaging to our creativity and our mental health.
Lylac aims to solve this (very large) issue, first by creating the world’s foremost centralised hive-mind of creative activity on the internet.
Creativity cannot exist in isolation.
Being able to connect to a network of other creatives around the globe lets you engage with like-minded people, find your interests and express your talent. With a variety of features allowing you to showcase the complexity of your practice, your profile has the ability to become your online portfolio- a digital studio, saving you time and money, you would otherwise have to spend on a domain, building a website and generating traffic. It's time we broke the wheel of existing social networking platforms. By creatives, for creatives.
I built, designed, and launched Lylac on my own after graduating in Architecture with First Class Honours from Central Saint Martins, London, in 2023.
Like so many of my peers across creative disciplines, I left university full of energy and ideas, only to find myself hitting the same wall: no paid work, no support, no real way in. It wasn’t a lack of work. It was a system that felt rigged — oversaturated, underpaid, and impossible to navigate without the right connections.
I didn’t know how to code back then, but I knew what needed to exist: a space where emerging creatives could not only showcase their work, but find each other. A place to connect across practices, build something bigger than just a portfolio, and move away from social media spaces where visibility is shallow and fleeting.
So I started building Lylac from scratch, teaching myself software engineering through YouTube tutorials, working in architecture and freelancing what I could in between, slowly shaping the platform I had imagined. Twelve months later, Lylac launched on the Apple App Store, and shortly after, on Google Play.
Lylac is for the ones who feel overlooked, underestimated, or just unsure of where to start. It’s for artists, designers, illustrators, photographers, anyone working creatively who wants to actively engage with other artists and wonderful thinkers. Lylac is about forming real connections with like-minded creatives, building your community, being recognised by industry professionals and feeling part of something new, something exciting.
Recap
July 2023
Aug - Nov 2023
Dec 2023
Jan 2024
Feb - Oct
Oct 2024
Jan 2025
Feb 2025
Present
During this time, I freelanced architecture work, graphic design, web design and software development, to pay bills and allow myself to work on Lylac.
With no outside investment, we're free from investors telling us what to do.
