The winners of the D&AD Pencils 2026 have been announced, recognising excellence and innovation in commercial creativity across a massive 46 categories, from craft to animation and advertising.
Some 573 awards were bestowed this year, including 52 coveted Yellow Pencils, along with two White Pencils celebrating creative work designed for social good and two Future Impact Pencils for new projects with the potential to drive behavioural, environmental, societal,or policy change. There were also 149 Graphite Pencils and 368 Wood Pencils.
Craft was this year’s top Pencil-winning discipline with 153 awards, while Film and Magazine & Newspaper Design each saw Yellow Pencils four winners.
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D&AD CEO, David Patton, highlighted the range of countries now entering the awards, with a record 89 nations represented among this year’s entries. He sees it as signalling a shift in the geographic distribution of global creativity.
“Significant growth in submissions from the UAE, India, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia signals that world-class creative ambition is no longer concentrated in a handful of markets, D&AD’s standard for excellence is being pursued and met across every continent,” he says. “Singapore is perhaps the best example of that shift. Eleven Pencils, five of them Yellow, an achievement that signals where global creativity is heading.
Lisa Smith, D&AD President and Uncommon Global Chief Design Officer, was impressed by the level of creative bravery displayed by this year’s winners. “Across disciplines, we saw teams pushing into genuinely new territory, from storytelling and traditional craft to emerging technologies and new forms of expression,” she says.
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Ogilvy Singapore picked up five Yellow Pencils in categories from Social to Experiential for Vaseline Verified. The campaign involved the creation of a self-sustaining engine that fact-checks and verifies the hacks shared by creators on social media.
The judges said the agency had “redefined what brand authority looks like in the contemporary creator economy”. The campaign was also credited with generating a +1,293% rise in brand mentions and a 43% rise in e-Commerce sales.
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Uncommon Creative Studio London was awarded with three Yellow Pencils for Periodic Fable, “a scientific table with zero science” created for skincare brand The Ordinary. The campaign used the instantly familiar form of the periodic table but replaced the chemical elements with 49 skincare marketing buzzwords to highlight the need for transparency amid today’s trend-led, overconsumption-driven culture.
The campaign extended from billboard ads into a surreal classroom film of students performing beauty routines, spanning OOH, social and influencer activations.
You can see details of all of the winners on the D&AD website.
Any rare Black Pencils this year won’t be announced until the ceremony, which takes place in September.
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