Apple invites you to decorate Battersea Power Station

Apple’s festive projections return to Battersea Power Station this year with Your Tree on Battersea – an open call to design a digital Christmas tree for display on the building’s chimneys and wash towers. After collaborations with David Hockney in 2023 and Aardman in 2024, the 2025 project mixes both commissioned iPad drawings from public figures and artists, including Sir Stephen Fry and David Shrigley, with public submissions.

24 entries from the public will be selected and shown alongside the commissioned pieces, including It’s Nice That favourites Things I Have Drawn, 3D studio Yonk and illustrator Oliver Jeffers. “It’s nice to be able to work with Apple again,” Oliver tells us, having worked with the brand plenty of times before. “It’s brilliant to be able to continue that relationship, and Battersea Power Station is so iconic, which is very cool to be a part of.” Similarly, for Yonk, the building itself offers a rather exciting opportunity: “It’ll be the largest projection of our work to date,” Yonk says, “having one of our characters appear on an iconic building overlooking the Thames is truly a dream.” For Olivia and Margaux, aged eight and four respectively, the fact that their drawings were going to be on Battersea was quite a surprise. “Only their parents and I knew the truth when they did the original drawings for me,” Things I Have Drawn says, keeping it a secret from their “two little co-designers” until afterwards. “We’ve certainly never had one of our creations turned into something so huge,” they continue, “I hope it’ll be one of those forever memories for them.”

With such a distinctive profile, there are very few buildings as recognisable and quintessentially London as Battersea Power Station, which has been home to Apple’s HQ since 2021. Apple’s seasonal projections onto its side transform two of its 100+ metre chimneys into an ultra-specific canvas for the artists to work within, the limitations of which acutely influence each piece. “Because it’s such a tall, skinny triangle,” Oliver explains, having noted the obvious restrictions of the chimney’s form, “everything in the concept comes first. You think about what you would like to see there and go from your very, very broad first reactions to the specific minutia of it,” he adds. Eight-year-old Olivia took to the template very well, Things I Have Drawn recalls, immediately taking to its tall, slinky stature. “I knew we were onto a winner,” they say, “Olivia almost read my mind, by creating a beautifully wonky tree that fitted the canvas perfectly”, whilst coincidently leaving space to include the robins she’d drawn earlier.

“Our tree definitely has some unique elements to it,” Yonk says, also speaking to the specifically odd canvas offered by the iconic building, and in turn, the creative benefits of working within unusual parameters. “For instance, having the top branches thinner to accommodate the tower’s chimneys. Those limitations eventually ended up adding to the character and charm of the tree.”

Both the medium and the scale itself equally influence the artists’ and designers’ drawings, particularly due to the quality that projection can offer. As Oliver explains, each light is considered a pixel, resulting in a relatively low-resolution projection. “That’s kind of the way that it is,” he says, “so it’s got to be big, and it’s got to be simple,” a philosophy to which Yonk similarly subscribed to in drawing for Battersea. “We usually take a maximalist approach, layering elements on top of each other,” Yonk says, “but in this case, working at such a large size, it felt better to strip things back,” instead focusing on bright, bold, distinctive forms that culminate to forge detail at such scale. “A trip to actually stand and look up at the building itself helped,” Things I Have Drawn adds, also noting the issue with surprisingly low image resolution. That said, they don’t think they’re ready to see the final thing in-situ. “I bet when I look at it, though, I’ll think, damn, I wish I’d spent more time on that bit there or slightly adjusted that bit there,” they say, “but that’s what all designers do, isn’t it?”

Submissions are open now and close on 23 November at 11:59pm. You can submit your iPad drawings from home or create a tree in participating Apple Stores across the UK. Apple will publicly unveil the winning submissions and commissioned designs on 4 December. The projections will be showing from 5pm–10:30pm each night until 24 December, lighting up the two chimneys and wash towers on the landmark’s river-facing facade.