2026 D&AD President’s Letter
Creativity is alive.
That might sound like a strange thing to have to say in the pages of the D&AD Annual. But this year, it felt important to say it.
We began the year with a provocation: Creativity is dead.
And we blamed everyone.
Not AI. Not social media. Not short form, phone cameras or in-house agencies. But every one of us who has spent more time talking about the death of creativity than doing something about it. Every thought piece instead of a thought. Every scroll instead of an idea. Every critic, passenger and excuse.
Because creativity doesn’t just survive. It has to be practised, protected, challenged and pushed forward.
And if you need evidence that it is alive, you’ll find plenty in this Annual.
Every year, D&AD brings together some of the most brilliant creative minds from around the world to judge the work they believe represents the very best of our industry. What they selected this year spans disciplines, cultures, technologies and mediums. Some of it uses the newest tools available to us. Some rely on techniques that have existed for generations. Some are enormous in scale. Some are extraordinarily simple.
But the best work shares something fundamental: somebody cared enough to make it great.
And nowhere is that more evident than in this year’s three Black Pencil winners.
Your Way Out for Coinbase creates an extraordinary video-game-like world almost entirely in-camera, using practical sets, real actors and brilliantly inventive 2D costumes to tell a story about financial autonomy. The Periodic Fable™ for The Ordinary transforms the familiar periodic table into a brilliantly simple takedown of beauty industry misinformation, replacing its elements with 49 marketing buzzwords. And Three Words for AXA might be the simplest idea of all: adding “and domestic violence” to 2.5 million home insurance contracts in France, giving women experiencing abuse access to emergency relocation.
Three Black Pencils that could hardly be more different. One creates an extraordinary new world. One subverts a system we already know. One changes a system from within. Together, they demonstrate the extraordinary breadth of what creativity can be, and what a Black Pencil has always stood for: an exceptional idea, executed with such conviction that it moves not only our industry, but sometimes the world beyond it, forward.
That same spirit ran through our Festival this year too.
We brought together people who have shaped creative culture for decades alongside voices appearing on a D&AD stage for the first time. From Stefan Sagmeister, Chaka Sobhani and David Lee to Court Williams, Alex Center, Talia Cotton and Shakira Polite, the ambition was to create the kind of collision D&AD has always been at its best: different generations, disciplines, perspectives and experiences coming together around a shared belief in the power of creativity.
One of the most meaningful moments for me personally was sitting down with the phenomenal Mary Lewis. In 1995, Mary became D&AD’s first female President after 33 consecutive years of male leadership. Exactly 30 years later, that baton passed to me. We talked about what has changed, what stubbornly hasn’t, the progress we’ve made in creating space for female creative leaders, and how much further there is still to go.
Thirty years is both an incredibly long time and no time at all. It was a reminder that progress doesn’t just happen. Like creativity, it requires people to care enough to push for it.
And if that conversation made me think about the last 30 years, New Blood made me think about the next 30. The standard of work this year was extraordinary. Not extraordinary “for students”, just extraordinary. Full of ideas, energy, experimentation and a willingness to question the conventions many of us have spent careers becoming comfortable with. If you want another reason to believe creativity is alive, spend some time with the next generation.
That responsibility extends far beyond who gets recognised in this Annual. D&AD exists not only to celebrate the people making extraordinary work today, but to help create the conditions for the next generation to make theirs. Through New Blood, Shift, our learning programmes and the wider D&AD community, we have a responsibility to open doors, raise standards, share knowledge and make sure more people have the opportunity to participate in this industry and shape where it goes next.
That feels especially urgent now.
AI will change our industry. New technologies will change it. New business models, new platforms and new generations will change it. They should. Creativity has always evolved alongside the world around it.
Our job isn’t to defend creativity from change. It’s to make sure we keep demanding more from it.
More original thinking. More bravery. More humanity. More obsession. More craft. More ideas that make us jealous we didn’t think of them ourselves.
The work in this Annual does exactly that.
It proves that whatever the tool, platform, format or medium, there will always be a difference between making something and making something that matters.
So rather than asking whether creativity is dead, perhaps there’s a better question.
What are you going to do to keep it alive?