The rarest pencil in the room: Revisiting D&AD 2025’s three Black Pencil winners

In a room full of pencils, the black one means something different. With no quota system for Pencil awards, D&AD maintains its reputation for uncompromising standards — in some years, no Black Pencils are given out at all. Which is exactly why, when three land in a single night, the industry pays attention.

At D&AD’s 63rd Awards Ceremony last May at London’s Southbank Centre, 668 Pencils were awarded across all categories. Three of them were black. This year’s jurors emphasized the commercial viability of creative work — not just ideas for the sake of having ideas, but the impact those ideas have on business success and on changing consumer behavior.

As former D&AD CEO Dara Lynch put it, the awards celebrated design “not just as a form of art, but as a catalyst for commercial success and behavioral change.”

The result: three winners that look nothing alike, but together make a coherent argument for what creative excellence actually means right now.

Designing Paris 2024: W Conran Design (Graphic Design)

The brief was, in theory, impossible: design a visual identity for a city the world already thinks it knows. W Conran Design’s answer for the Paris 2024 Olympics didn’t reach for nostalgia or postcard beauty.

Instead, it built a bold, modular system inspired by the pavés — the iconic cobblestones of Parisian streets — creating something that could stretch across stadiums, airports, fan zones, and volunteers’ uniforms without ever losing itself.

Judges praised it as a breakthrough for sports marketing aesthetics — playful and scalable, successfully blending heritage with contemporary sport. It also took home two Wood Pencils in Spatial Design. The larger point the jury was making: design at this scale should feel local and alive, not like a logo applied to a city.

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A$AP Rocky – ‘Tailor Swif’: Iconoclast LA (Music Video)

Set against the backdrop of Kyiv, Ukraine, and built from surreal, meme-fluent imagery, A$AP Rocky’s “Tailor Swif” video wasn’t trying to be a conventional music video — and that was precisely the point.

The Black Pencil in Music Video underscored an overarching theme across the 2025 awards: the importance of narrative storytelling, and specifically long-form storytelling where the music is integral to the narrative rather than an afterthought.

Iconoclast LA’s work earned a Yellow Pencil for Art Direction, two Graphite Pencils for Concept and Visual Effects, and a shortlist placement for Cinematography. What made it land with the jury wasn’t the provocation — it was the commitment to a coherent, fully realized world.

Spreadbeats: FCB New York (Digital Marketing)

If the Paris 2024 identity was design at its most expansive, Spreadbeats was creativity at its most mischievous. FCB New York built an entire music album inside Microsoft Excel — complete with animated visualizations, original tracks, and a fully functional spreadsheet interface. The agency described the work as “innovation through nostalgic technologies.”

The jury agreed: Spreadbeats was the most decorated work of the night, earning 15 Pencils in total — including three Yellows in Art Direction for Digital Content, Illustration for Digital, and Media for Direct. It also took eight Graphite Pencils across Animation, Art Direction, Digital Design, and Production Design, plus four Wood Pencils spanning PR, Visual Effects, and Entertainment.

The point it makes isn’t just about a clever format. It’s about what happens when a brand stops asking “where’s the audience?” and starts asking “what if we built something they’ve genuinely never seen before?”

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D&AD Trustee Lisa Smith, Global Executive Creative Director at Jones Knowles Ritchie, said: “Too many entries follow the same established design codes and trends, making everything start to look and feel alike, regardless of category. The work that stood out — and was ultimately awarded — was the kind that breaks away from the expected: inspiring, well-crafted, and truly fit for purpose.”

As D&AD’s 2026 cycle moves toward its own reckoning — with Black Pencil winners now announced in a September ceremony and new categories like Cultural Influence and Brand Transformation entering the mix — the 2025 class sets a useful benchmark. Not just for what won, but for what the work was willing to risk.

adobo Magazine is an official media partner of the 2026 D&AD Festival.

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