The Black Pencil, which the Design and Art Direction organization awards only to work it considers "truly groundbreaking," is the advertising industry's equivalent of a no-hitter: it does not happen every year, and when it does, people tend to remember.
This year, it happened four times.
Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange that has made a habit of attention-getting advertising (its bouncing QR code during a recent Super Bowl comes to mind), collected two Black Pencils at a ceremony in London on Wednesday for a single campaign called "Your Way Out." The spot, which ran during the Academy Awards telecast in February, was set in a video game universe but constructed using traditional filmmaking craft — a combination that the judges apparently found novel enough to honor twice, once for visual effects and once for production design.
The campaign was created by Isle of Any, an independent agency, which suggests that the big holding company networks do not have a monopoly on this particular form of recognition. (They rarely enjoy being reminded of that.)
The Ordinary, the skincare brand known for its clinical packaging and its pointed indifference to marketing mythology, won for art direction with "The Periodic Fable," a campaign that replaced chemical elements with beauty industry buzzwords — a literalization of the brand's longstanding position that most skincare advertising is, to put it politely, overselling. The work came from Uncommon Creative Studio, which was also named Advertising Agency of the Year.
AXA, the French insurer, took the fourth Black Pencil for a campaign that changed its home insurance policies to assist people escaping domestic violence. The work, from Publicis Conseil, has been collecting trophies since last year's Cannes Lions, where it won the Titanium Grand Prix.
Irma Boom, the Dutch book designer sometimes called "the queen of books," received the President's Award.
It was, in other words, a year when making something carefully still seemed to count.
Original story published in Adweek: "These Are the 4 Black Pencil Winners of the 2026 D&AD Awards"