We're excited to announce the winners of the Brand Impact Awards 2026. Following the celebration event, at which we revealed the Best of Show and Social Impact Award recipients, we can now publish the full list of Gold, Silver and Bronze award winners.
After shortlisting 29 agencies with a total of 41 projects, it was the job of our expert global jury to award them their specific accolades. Our new three-stage judging process culminated in a specialist panel, which benchmarked the Gold winners to ensure only the best work was awarded at the highest level. This panel also chose the Best of Show, while the Social Impact Award was chosen by a separate panel.
This resulted in four Gold, 17 Silver, and 31 Bronze winners, all of whom will receive one of our coveted Brand Impact Award mallets. Find them all below, and our warmest congratulations to the worthy winners.
Best of Show
The Runner-Up for Best of Show was Rail Clock by Design Bridge & Partners, a stunning experiential project that picked up a Gold Award (read more about it below).
But the winner is...
V&A East by Fieldwork Facility
V&A East Storehouse reimagines the museum experience, giving the public radical access to the V&A's stored collections of over 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives across 16,000 square metres. The challenge for Fieldwork Facility was to make this new museum typology feel intuitive and welcoming, especially for younger, diverse audiences who might not see national collections as being for them.
The agency's solution treated Storehouse like software, built around the idea of an "operating system." Wayfinding became a way to search and discover, while interpretation invited visitors to decode, and even hack, the museum, encouraging them to chart their own path. This single idea runs consistently through typography, signage, digital content and operational design, creating a coherent, modular system built for a living, evolving collection.
The result is a public interface for an entirely new kind of cultural experience, one that doesn't tell visitors what to think, but gives them the tools to explore for themselves.
One judge admitted to being "totally obsessed" with it, and another added that it “completely reinvented what a museum could be.”
Social Impact
Runner-up honours go to For What Matters in Childhood by UnitedUs for a truly ambitious concept that was excellently executed (read more about it below as this brilliant project won a Bronze Award in Not-For-Profit).
But the winner is...
Where There's a Tree for WWF, by Johnson Banks
The campaign marks new territory for WWF UK, opening up direct conversations with trusts, corporates and philanthropists about supporting its work on tropical deforestation, which is now the charity's top strategic priority.
The challenge was that WWF's public image is tied to orangutans, elephants and pandas, the animals that call these rainforests home. Johnson Banks needed a fresh way to connect those species to their habitat, explain why it matters to both wildlife and indigenous communities, and unpack the supply chains driving forest loss week by week.
The agency flipped the narrative entirely, building the campaign around a spare, almost poetic opening line: "where there's a tree..." Rather than leaning on the doom-laden messaging typical of deforestation campaigns, it led with everything a tree, and by extension a forest, provides a home to. The shift in tone has reframed the conversation, with a flexible structure that can turn punchier when the moment calls for it, including showing, starkly, what's lost when the tree is gone.
One judge called it an "infinite storytelling device" that could "express the complexities of ecological challenges and relationships in a pithy, meaningful way."
"The versatility of the structure kept surprising me," they said, "and the lines deftly brought home the realities of deforestation with wit and empathy."
Gold Awards
The following projects took home a Gold trophy.
New York Philharmonic, by JKR
- Gold Award: Culture
The New York Philharmonic exists to bring people together through music, but its branding hadn't caught up with that mission. JKR was tasked with repositioning the orchestra as inclusive, current and unmistakably tied to New York City, extending its presence beyond the concert hall and into every borough.
The solution leans hard on the city's own visual vocabulary: tall, condensed type nods to Manhattan's verticality, illustration reworks classical symbols with street-level attitude, and a palette balances stark black-and-white against flashes of city energy. The system holds together across every touchpoint without flattening its different parts, echoing the way New York itself layers scale, rhythm and diversity. The aim throughout was to present classical music not as something rarefied, but as current, shared and woven into everyday city life.
Rail Clock, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Gold Award: Experiential
Britain's railway hasn't had a single, unified clock design in over fifty years, leaving passengers without a consistent way to check the time. To mark 200 years since Britain's first railway, Network Rail ran an international design competition with RIBA and The Design Museum to solve the problem.
Design Bridge and Partners' winning entry, Rail Clock, builds on Gerry Barney's legendary Double Arrow symbol, animating the once-static mark with the actual passage of time: the two arrows rotate in opposite directions, meeting briefly every 30 seconds, then locking together and sweeping clockwise for a full minute at noon and midnight.
The physical build pairs back-to-back screens that echo the arrow symbol in profile, using a modular, low-cost, low-maintenance design made in Britain. Accessibility experts helped shape a bold display paired with an updated Rail Alphabet 2 typeface. Since unveiling at London Bridge Station in October 2025, Rail Clock has earned praise from design figures including Gerry Barney and Margaret Calvert, and will gradually roll out across 2,500 mainline stations.
Stella Artois – Dressed for Wimbledon, by JKR x GUT Amsterdam
- Gold Award: Wine, Beer & Spirits
Stella Artois has always leaned on tradition such as its colours and its trademark pour, but at Wimbledon, no rule matters more than the tournament's famously strict all-white dress code. JKR and GUT Amsterdam's answer was to have Stella break its own branding conventions and blend in instead: a limited-edition White Can, almost entirely white apart from a trim of colour at the rim, built to comply with the same dress code players follow.
The Stella Cartouche and other brand marks were carefully debossed so they sit just proud of the surface, visible but understated, much like a sportswear logo on a crisp polo shirt. A Wimbledon purple-and-green rim trim finished the look, and each can was individually numbered from 1 to 148 – one for every year the dress code has stood. The can anchored a wider 360-degree campaign that used the tournament's traditions as a way into both real-time relevance and Wimbledon's own history.
V&A East Storehouse, by V&A East / Fieldwork Facility
- Gold Award: Culture
V&A East Storehouse reinvents what a museum visit can be, opening up the V&A's stored collections of more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives across 16,000 square metres to the public. The brief was to make an entirely new kind of museum feel welcoming and intuitive to audiences, particularly younger and more diverse visitors, who might not have seen national collections as being for them.
The team's response treats Storehouse like software, building the whole identity around the idea of an "operating system": wayfinding becomes an interface for searching and discovering the building, while interpretation invites visitors to discover, decode and even "hack" the museum on their own terms. That single idea runs through typography, colour, signage, interpretation, digital content and operational graphics, held together by a modular visual language that can evolve without waste as the live collections store changes. Rather than designing communications for a museum, the team designed the public interface for a genuinely new kind of cultural experience.
Lenovo Legion: Always Get Back Up, by Design Bridge & Partners
- Gold Award: Motion
To launch Lenovo Legion's "Reach Your Impossible" platform to Gen-Z gamers, the campaign transformed an everyday student flat into a battle-zone with a hero film spanning horror, sci-fi, competitive shooter, RPG, indie and fantasy genres, rather than sticking to a single gaming aesthetic.
The motion craft was the campaign's engine, including 70 intricate 2D and 3D VFX shots, including six fully designed boss characters, blurred the line between live-action and CG. Remote VFX supervision using Gaussian Splats and Insta360 cameras kept the interaction between real footage and digital effects seamless, while high-impact editing and a visceral soundscape, anchored by Hanumankind's "Big Dawgs", gave the film its relentless, kinetic energy.
The result was Lenovo Legion's biggest campaign to date, racking up over 157 million views and 34,000 hours of watch time, alongside a measurable lift in brand preference and innovation perception among younger gamers.
Silver Awards
The following projects were awarded Silver:
Aperol, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Silver Award: Wine, Beer & Spirits
Aperol's bottle redesign leans into the brand's role as an antidote to rushed modern life, capturing the ritual of the Italian aperitivo – slowing down, sharing small plates, and savouring golden-hour moments with others. The new bottle is tactile and rooted in Venetian culture: its double-embossed shoulder nods to the dome of the Santa Maria della Salute Basilica, while rippled glass echoes the movement of the canals and the craft of Murano glassmakers. The founding Barbieri brothers' original 1919 seal sits at the base, grounding the redesign in the brand's history even as the bottle itself moves in a more contemporary direction.
Aqua Libra – Refreshingly Good, by Magpie Studio
- Silver Award: Illustration
Only around 5% of adults say they genuinely enjoy drinking plain water, so Aqua Libra set out to make hydration more appealing through flavour, personality and emotional pull rather than sugar or additives. Magpie Studio built the "Refreshingly Good" platform around this idea, working with illustrator Chris DeLorenzo to create a distinct water-based world for each flavour – oceans, quiet lakes, rain, sunlight – instead of leaning on predictable fruit imagery.
The loose, handcrafted linework mirrors the movement of water, with small imperfections giving it warmth and humanity. The illustrations scale from a single focused moment on individual cans to fuller, more immersive compositions across multipacks, and elements can be lifted out and animated for campaigns and digital use, keeping the system flexible without losing coherence. In a category built on functional health claims, the work leans on imagination and discovery instead.
Blueprint AI – Human Powered, by Squarespace / ManvsMachine
- Silver Award: Motion
For Squarespace's Blueprint AI film, ManvsMachine wanted to frame artificial intelligence as something rooted in human creativity rather than pure automation. The film traces a website's origin back to its earliest, most tactile stage – a designer's sketchbook – following ideas as they move from rough, imperfect beginnings to finished digital work.
Every illustration, typographic element and environmental detail in the sketchbook world was built in-house for full creative coherence, and the narrative mixes in-camera practical effects with refined 3D animation to keep a sense of physicality throughout. By centring the act of thinking rather than the finished product, the film grounds an advanced AI tool in something relatable and human, standing apart from typical tech-brand communications
Canva Affinity: Zero Bucks Given, by Canva / ManvsMachine
- Silver Award: Motion
To launch Canva's new Affinity software, ManvsMachine reframed "free" not as a limitation but as creative freedom, positioning Affinity as a serious, professional-grade tool built by creatives, for creatives. Rather than a conventional feature-led software explainer, the film focuses on the emotional experience of making work, exploring the tension between restriction and possibility. It combines 2D and 3D animation, kinetic typography and hand-drawn illustration into a high-energy, expressive visual system, with product moments folded naturally into the storytelling rather than isolated as demos. A key walk-cycle sequence was built from frames submitted by real Affinity users, tying the film's craft to genuine creative community rather than typical software-launch messaging.
Character.ai, by PORTO ROCHA
- Silver Award: Copywriting
Character.AI risked being written off as just another companion chatbot, despite ambitions to be an immersive entertainment platform where users direct real-time stories through chat. PORTO ROCHA noticed that much of the community already used roleplay to explore different sides of themselves without judgment, and built a character to give that impulse a face: Chippy, the "good glitch" living inside the platform, born from the app's own leftover code and inspired by early internet culture and companion misfits.
Chippy's voice of creative disobedience stretches from "Press any key to unhinge" in out-of-home ads to reassuring, storytelling-fluent copy in error messages, using expressive emoticons and internet-native phrasing that mirrors how the platform's most engaged users already talk. Where most AI chatbots read as flat and technical, Chippy behaves like a participant in the story, a sidekick cheering on users as they go off-script, making the brand feel as alive and imaginative as the platform itself.
Eleven as One, by Saboteur
- Silver Award: Copywriting
Women's grassroots football participation in the UK has grown 56% over four years, yet kit options were still stuck with oversized shirts and a "shrink it and pink it" approach. When entrepreneur Julia Cove-Smith set out to build the first football kit designed by women, for women, Saboteur avoided the obvious route of building another elite-performance brand and instead built Eleven as One around the emotion and connection of grassroots women's football.
The tone taps into the sport's growing confidence and playfulness, guided by a story from a player nicknamed "Eileen the Octopus" who joined a Monday-night team because she wanted to start her week off right. The guiding copy rule became "if you wouldn't put it in the team WhatsApp, we won't say it" — a voice built on humour and warmth across headlines, social posts and product copy, aimed at making women want to wear the feeling football gives them.
Heineken StarMark Glass, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Silver Award: Wine, Beer & Spirits
Heineken's green bottle is instantly recognisable, but once poured, the beer looked much like any other premium lager in a glass, and existing Heineken glassware wasn't doing enough work. Design Bridge and Partners' brief was to create a signature glass that was ownable, "stealable" and globally iconic. Global research pointed to two brand elements that resonate everywhere: the wordmark's "smiling e's" and the red Heineken star. Rather than starting from a blank page, the team built the new StarMark Glass directly from those existing assets. It rises from a star-shaped punt with a tall taper, the vertical wordmark climbing to a red star positioned at the exact height of Heineken's "perfect pour." The alignment turns a long-standing bar ritual into a physical design feature, leaving a crisp, star-shaped condensation mark on the bar when it's lifted.
Holt Art Projects, by Studio Sutherl&
- Silver Award: Culture
Holt Art Projects (HAP) builds on the fifteen-year legacy of Holt Festival, combining live music, conversation, art and culture with a visual art awards scheme spanning seven categories, with shortlisted work shown in an annual exhibition. Studio Sutherl& drew the identity from flint, a material deeply tied to Holt and North Norfolk's history and architecture, including the Neolithic flint mines at Grimes Graves.
The system is built from multifaceted forms that reference flint's fractured surfaces while working together, echoing the knapped flint walls found throughout Holt's buildings. Like the programme itself, each shape is distinct but part of a larger whole, and the mark and typography shift in scale and orientation to reflect the breadth of the awards, exhibitions and performances. A flint-grey palette paired with bright pink and orange accents runs across posters, flyers, event spaces, merchandise and digital communications.
KFC, by JKR
- Silver Award: Bars & Restaurants
KFC didn't need reinvention – it already had a recognisable founder, an iconic palette, a famous slogan and packaging embedded in pop culture. What it needed was relevance: US sales fell 4% in 2024, dropping the chain to fifth among American chicken competitors, as faster-moving challengers built on more modern tastes caught up. JKR's move was to turn the bucket, already KFC's most ownable asset, into more than packaging – an organising system for the whole brand experience, from a visual frame for food to a structure for restaurants, digital ordering and service moments.
This system, the "Bucketverse," reframes KFC not as a quick-service restaurant but as a quick-experience one, where every route in, from signage to app, kiosk to counter, feels part of one unmistakable world. It's built to hold consistent across more than 34,000 restaurants in over 150 countries, with a new KFC opening roughly every three and a half hours.
League of the Lexicon, by Studio Sutherl&
- Silver Award: Entertainment
League of the Lexicon is a trivia game built for word nerds, quiz obsessives and the endlessly curious, spanning 2,000 questions across five categories covering definitions, usage, archaic words, etymology and word trivia. Players take on bookish character roles, collecting historical and literary artefacts as they progress.
Studio Sutherl&'s identity celebrates typography, history and linguistics to match the game's academic charm, weaving glyphs from ancient international alphabets into the core logo and gameplay icons, forming patterns inspired by the typographic borders of traditional bookplates. Custom roundels built from pairs of glyphs tie the core game together with its Slang, Global and Junior expansions, while highly detailed bespoke illustrations bring the game's eccentric characters and artefacts to life with archival precision. Even the dice ditches conventional dots for number formations and an interrobang symbol. The system is flexible enough to unify the core game and its expansions while supporting further product development, and it's published across the US and UK.
Ostara, by Here design
- Silver Award: Illustration
Easter packaging is one of retail's most crowded categories, typically leaning on pastel palettes, cartoon rabbits and generic florals. Fortnum & Mason wanted a range that stood apart and justified its premium price point. Here design rooted the collection in Ostara, the pagan festival of spring and the little-known myth behind Easter's origin – a goddess turning an injured bird into a hare that laid coloured eggs – and commissioned illustrator Lou Benesch to bring that world to life by hand in watercolour, drawing on folklore, nature and mythological creatures.
The work deliberately shifts the protagonist from rabbit to hare, mythologically more accurate and visually more characterful, running across the range as motif and mascot. The loose, unfinished quality of the illustration is the craft itself — every pack feels caught mid-transformation, echoing the myth. The artwork holds together across more than 20 products, from a £165 assortment box down to a £6.95 matchbox of chocolate hares, including a children's line led by its own character, Harrie the hare.
PJL, Premier Jumping League, by NOT Wieden+Kennedy
- Silver Award: Sport & Leisure
Showjumping had an image problem, often read as a genteel world of flowerbeds and polite applause rather than the high-adrenaline sport it actually is: two athletes, horse and rider, pushing the limits of physics together. The Premier Jumping League wanted to launch a new global showjumping league that reframed the sport as spectacle without alienating its existing fanbase.
NOT Wieden+Kennedy anchored the identity in the rail — the sport's most iconic fixture, using it as the basis for grids, motion, layout and imagery across broadcast, merchandise and signage. The logo is an athletic wordmark that hides a nod to the sport's most pivotal moment – the instant a horse tucks its hooves to clear the rail – within its letterforms. The tone of voice took a similarly bold turn, with lines like "Not all athletes are human," while a bespoke typeface co-designed with Studio Drama echoes the angle of horse and rider mid-takeoff. Photography by Daniel Benson, known for shooting BMX, brings the same close, physical energy to horses, and a launch film directed by Nicolina Knapp captures a full minute of tension and motion.
Plymouth City brand, by DNCO
Silver Award: Brand Strategy
Known as Britain's Ocean City, Plymouth already had a strong tourism identity built on a history of remarkable voyages, but with 25,000 new jobs to fill, the city needed to be seen as somewhere to build a career, not just visit. DNCO spent time embedded in the city, visiting landmarks, interviewing locals and visitors, digging through museum archives and running a week-long creative residency, drawing on 250 creative responses, 100 UK-wide surveys and 100 interviews, backed by economic research.
Three insights stood out: Plymouth sits uniquely between a national park and a national marine park, it offers a high quality of life relative to similar cities, and it carries a legacy of exploration, from Darwin to Dame Ellen MacArthur. Together, these shaped the central idea of adventure, expressed through the tagline "Make life an adventure," inviting both newcomers and residents to see the city as a place of ambition and curiosity. Where many UK coastal cities struggle to be seen as more than a holiday destination, Plymouth's strategy turns that same coastal identity into its strongest case for relocating.
Probably Serif, by Taxi Studio
- Silver Award: Typography
Carlsberg has spent over 150 years balancing science and imagination, a tension embodied in its 1904 brandmark by Thorvald Bindesbøll – organic yet precise, fluid yet structured. Taxi Studio's Probably Serif translates that DNA into a full typeface, designed so Carlsberg stays recognisable even without its logo present — a strategic necessity in "dark markets" where alcohol promotion is restricted and packaging assets like the logo may be banned outright.
The team deconstructed the original mark and archival material to build a system from its most distinctive traits: the sheared, flat-topped "C" and "s", the single-storey "a" and "g", and the flicks, curves, ligatures and slab serifs that give the mark its rhythm. The result works across packaging, campaign, digital, retail and environmental applications, supporting both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, and is built entirely from Carlsberg's own visual history rather than generic beer-category heritage.
Schweppes, by JKR
- Silver Award: FMCG
Schweppes is the world's original soft drink at nearly 250 years old, but a wave of artisanal newcomers like Fever-Tree and Fentimans had started borrowing its own heritage cues, such as vintage stamps, to compete against it. Meanwhile Schweppes itself had leaned into mass-market accessibility, quietly diluting its craft credentials. JKR's strategy was to reclaim rather than reinvent – Schweppes, not its challengers, has the real claim to "craft."
The redesign unifies the brand's fragmented global look around a saffron-yellow beacon, drawing on archive research and fountain illustrations to bring in more serifs, ornate detailing, distinctive angles, monograms and patterns, with golden-hour lighting running through the photography. The rollout includes directly printed aluminium cans to cut unnecessary packaging, alongside secondary carton and box formats, launching across the UK and South Africa from December 2025 ahead of further markets in 2026.
Somer Valley Brewing, by Supple Studio
- Silver Award: Illustration
Somer Valley grows its own barley on its farm using rotational cropping alongside a herd of heritage cows, sends the harvest a few miles down the A36 to be traditionally floor-malted in Warminster, and even draws its own water from a bore hole on-site. Supple Studio built the identity around the idea "From our land, to your hand," and, since so much of the process already happens on the farm, made the brand assets there too – working with Bath-based illustrator Simon Spilsbury to create textures by printing, rubbing and inking everything from hay bales to tractor wheels, then layering in farm-based illustrations full of wit and charm.
Beer names draw on farmyard sayings and West Country slang, giving the brand a distinct regional accent that shows up everywhere from packaging to wall art and social content. The brand has since extended to its first taproom, aptly named The Welly.
WKD, by Continuous
- Silver Award: Brand Strategy
WKD built its name on connection and turning ordinary nights into stories, but had slipped from provocative to peripheral among 18-24-year-olds, with consideration down 43% year-on-year. While headlines obsessed over a "sober generation," Gen Z alcohol consumption had actually risen from 66% to 73% between March 2023 and 2025; the real shift, Continuous argued, was exhaustion with "betterment burnout," not sobriety.
The resulting platform, "All Fun. No Filters," leans into self-aware humour and honesty rather than chasing the aspirational tone much of the category was adopting, reviving the "WKD Side" tagline to keep the brand name front and centre. A Humour Matrix, co-created with 18-24-year-olds, helped navigate the line between cheeky and offensive. Posed lifestyle imagery was banned outright in favour of unpolished, slightly chaotic real nights, with bold copy poking fun at the brand itself rather than others, rolled out through WKD's regional heartlands across digital, out-of-home and on-trade activity. 76% of consumers said the resulting campaign could only have come from WKD.
Bronze Awards
The following projects were awarded Bronze:
Best of the Bone, by Universal Favourite
- Bronze Award: Copywriting
Best of the Bone makes properly made bone broth – organic, grass-fed, slow-simmered, with none of the miracle-elixir or wellness-mysticism framing that dominates the category. Universal Favourite built the brand's whole voice around that same bluntness: real ingredients, no additives, no preservatives, nothing dressed up. The tone is dry, irreverent and deliberately unpolished, finding warmth and wit in plain speech rather than clinical authority or ancient-wisdom posturing.
On the packaging, ingredients are named without fanfare and benefits are stated without spin; in wider brand communications, the copy finds unexpected angles like a steaming mug on a fjord, a broth-soaked head of hair, while always circling back to one simple message: it's just bone broth, and that's enough. In a category weighed down by jargon and overclaiming, the confidence to say less has deepened the brand's relationship with its loyal following.
Blood Cancer United, by JKR
- Bronze Award: Not-For-Profit
The Leukaemia & Lymphoma Society was founded in 1949 by a family who'd lost their son to leukaemia, determined to spare others the same loss. Over the decades its work expanded to cover all blood cancers and a much wider range of audiences, but its branding hadn't kept pace – and the COVID pandemic exposed just how siloed and disjointed its various efforts had become. JKR's solution was a new name, Blood Cancer United, that makes the scope of the organisation's work immediately clear, paired with an identity built to unify every campaign, event and fundraising effort under one visual language. What was once a sprawling, fragmented network comprised of patient support, fundraising and research now speaks with a single, consistent voice, sending a direct message to everyone living with blood cancer that they're not alone.
For What Matters in Childhood, by UnitedUs
- Bronze Award: Not-For-Profit
Buttle has provided beds, coats, laptops and other essentials to children in crisis since 1953, carrying on the vision of founder Reverend Frank Buttle. But by 2024, the charity's modest legacy brand couldn't carry the weight of an ambitious new five-year strategy or amplify children's voices as demand and advocacy needs grew. UnitedUs's rebrand, "For what matters in childhood," rejects pity-driven, deficit-based poverty narratives in favour of a child's dignity, agency, joy and hope.
The Brighton-based B Corp co-designed the identity directly with the young people Buttle serves – a Youth Advisory Panel steered the creative direction and conceived Frank the Otter, a character from their own imagination named after the founder. The brand launched at the Houses of Parliament alongside Buttle's first children's art project, giving young people a platform to share what the charity's support meant to them in their own words – often the first time stakeholders had heard directly from children rather than through adults. The work transforms a quiet grant-giver into a confident, advocacy-led voice built to influence national policy.
Hellmann's Lifts It, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Bronze Award: FMCG, Brand Strategy
Facing shifting food trends and rising consumer expectations, mayonnaise category leader Hellmann's needed a refresh to hold onto its market dominance, built on the insight that people are tired of overhyped food fads and just want genuine enjoyment in everyday meals. Design Bridge and Partners centred the work on "Hellmann's Lifts It," inspired by the brand's century-old blue ribbon symbol of top-quality mayonnaise, positioning a dollop of Hellmann's as the thing that elevates simple food into something more. The ribbon was amplified in a refined logo and new "H" monogram, packaging was redesigned across more than 90 products, and the brand's cartouche became a flexible "window" onto lifted food and moments, all supported by a new colour palette, a custom Dollop Serif typeface, upward-angled photography and optimistic motion design. Since launch, "Worth Paying More For" perception has climbed from 49% to 61%, with measurable gains over competitors in shelf findability, purchase intent and perceived taste and excitement.
Joby Aviation, by TinyWins
- Bronze Award: Motion
As Joby Aviation prepared to launch a new era of all-electric flight, motion became a central tool for conveying both the emotion and mechanics of a mode of transport most people have never experienced. TinyWins developed a motion language inspired by aviation's golden age and the physical sensation of ascent and arrival, aiming to make audiences feel the promise of flight throughout the digital experience. Typography, transitions and interface elements move with the rhythm of flight, and signature brand devices animate throughout to carry the aircraft's visual language into digital spaces. Working with INK Studio, the system extends into high-fidelity 3D visualisations and technical, schematic storytelling that turns complex engineering into clear, compelling narrative – serving both emotional and functional roles at once, building wonder while explaining innovation.
Kiko Martins: A Culinary Journey, by Peter Schmidt Group
- Bronze Award: Bars & Restaurants
Kiko Martins, a Michelin-starred chef from Portugal, built a reputation on culinary curiosity, studying regional dishes from his travels and folding them into his own cooking. Peter Schmidt Group translated that journey into a simple, striking identity: every location is marked by its geographic coordinates – degrees, minutes and seconds. The result reads as minimalist but story-rich, working consistently across physical and digital touchpoints from menu to website, while positioning Kiko as a cosmopolitan figure and his dishes as cross-cultural creations within a crowded restaurant industry.
KFC, by JKR / JKR x Studio DRAMA
- Bronze Award: Brand Strategy, Illustration, Typography
Chicken has gone mainstream, and everyone from global chains to regional upstarts has moved into the category KFC itself built – US sales fell 4% in 2024, dropping the brand to fifth place among American chicken chains. JKR's read was that the product had never lost its edge, only the brand's expression of it, so the work reoriented everything around making experiences feel "Finger Lickin' Good" – elevating a legacy slogan into a defined standard of behaviour applied through the bucket, KFC's most ownable asset, across packaging, restaurants, digital and menu innovation. For illustration, rather than defining one fixed style for over 34,000 restaurants in 150-plus countries, the team put the bucket shape in the hands of native artists around the world – five illustrators from Buenos Aires to Xiamen, Lima to Mumbai, each given the same brief (make it Finger Lickin' Good) and free rein within an open "Creativity" palette held together by KFC's black, red and white.
For typography, working with Studio DRAMA, the brand's red stripes were rebuilt from decoration into a full storytelling device: a refined lettermark led to Kentucky Fried Stripes, a display typeface, plus a custom web tool that automatically turns copy into stripes, and a wider Kentucky Fried Serif and Sans family tuned for legibility from billboards to fry bags.
Lenovo Legion – Always Get Back Up, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Bronze Award: Experiential
Lenovo Legion's "Always Get Back Up" campaign, built on the insight that gamers have to lose before they win, spans horror, sci-fi, shooter, RPG, indie and fantasy genres rather than committing to one, following a gamer repeatedly knocked down by different bosses who keeps getting back up.
The team transformed an ordinary student flat into a battle zone using 70 2D and 3D VFX shots, six bespoke boss designs, and remote VFX supervision via Gaussian Splats and Insta360 cameras to blend live action and CG. A community competition let fans design the ultimate boss, with the winner flown to set to collaborate directly. Backed by Hanumankind's "Big Dawgs" and extended into DOOH "Pile of Bosses" builds recreated at Gamescom, the campaign generated over 157 million views and 34,000 hours of watch time, becoming Legion's biggest campaign yet.
Little Dish – Happy Healthy Mealtimes, by Derek&Eric
- Bronze Award: FMCG
Little Dish had become one of the UK's most-loved children's food brands, but its identity hadn't kept pace as the portfolio expanded beyond its original meals — it needed something more distinctive and scalable that could support innovation while keeping parents' trust. Derek&Eric's strategic idea, "Happy Healthy Mealtimes," shifts the focus from nutrition alone to the joy of feeding children well, and became the foundation for the whole rebrand.
The team evolved the existing Little Dish icon into a more expressive asset, added a playful illustration world and bespoke typography, and built a flexible system that balances warmth, appetite appeal and clear navigation across packaging, digital, retail activation and innovation work. Rather than a cosmetic refresh, it's a brand system designed for growth – one that leans into the happiness of family mealtimes in a category dominated by functional nutrition messaging.
Lost and Found by King's Culture, by Alphabetical
- Bronze Award: Culture, Education
Lost & Found is a year-long programme of art, film, photography and public discussion built around displacement, belonging and sanctuary, reflecting King's Culture's status as a University of Sanctuary at King's College London. Rather than a static identity, Alphabetical built one that behaves like the stories it represents: bold letterforms from the words LOST & FOUND disappear, fragment and reappear in altered shapes, graphically expressing journeys of displacement and resilience, while individual letterforms double as flexible frames for artists, events and stories.
The identity launched alongside Es Devlin's installation Congregation and ran through a year-long festival across exhibitions, talks, films, performances and public installations throughout Strand Aldwych and King's College London, opened by the Mayor of London and featuring artists including Es Devlin, Tiffany Fairey, Susan Aldworth, Liz Hingley and Aman Aheer. Rather than simply promoting events, the identity became an active storytelling device, continually embodying the idea of sanctuary as the programme evolved.
Moncler x Gilga Farm, by Moncler / WeSayHi / ManvsMachine
- Bronze Award: Motion
To launch Donald Glover's capsule collection with Moncler, the team reinterpreted one of the brand's most distinctive heritage assets — its 1960s care-label comic strip featuring mascot Monduck – drawing on Glover's Ojai-based creative hub, Gilga Farm, and his interest in lucid dreaming. The resulting dreamlike film follows Monduck mischievously guiding Glover through a series of wardrobe transformations via a radio dial, each station revealing a new look, before Glover wakes on a mountain in the collection's sleeping bag jacket, tying the collaboration back to Moncler's mountaineering roots.
When production moved from live action to animation, the team treated it as an opportunity: the comic strip was recreated as a physical care label sewn inside the jacket, just like a real Moncler label, blending hand-drawn animation with 3D cloth simulation to bring it to life. Every choice reinforced the link between Moncler's heritage and the new collection, resulting in a campaign defined by originality and craft.
Nordeste, by Design Bridge and Partners
- Bronze Award: Transport & Travel
The Brazilian Northeast is usually sold on postcard clichés — sun, sea, beaches — but "Nordeste Além" (Northeast Beyond) set out to reveal a region as diverse as it is exuberant, representing nine independent states through one distinctive symbol while avoiding generic tourism tropes and stereotypes. Design Bridge and Partners' solution is a bird built from geometric shapes and colours drawn from local festivals, dances and artistic traditions — singular yet plural, synthesising diverse cultures and geographies into one identity. Its graphic components can be broken apart and reused as a modular design language, keeping visual consistency across every touchpoint. By translating recurring patterns and symbols, from cordel literature to visual art, into a contemporary visual language, the brand moves the Northeast from a landscape to be looked at into an experience to be lived, giving all nine states a shared, proprietary voice on the world stage.
NYCFC – The Five Borough Flight, by Tavern Agency
- Bronze Award: Experiential
When the FIFA Club World Cup landed in the New York area, New York City FC found itself shut out of the conversation in its own hometown, unaffiliated with the tournament while the world's attention turned to nearby MetLife Stadium. Tavern Agency's brief was simple: get New York talking about NYCFC. The solution drew on the club's unofficial mascot, the pigeon, building a guerrilla activation around a 700-pound, five-storey inflatable pigeon that floated past all five boroughs.
In the weeks before launch, smaller pigeon-branded content and real pigeons kitted out in NYCFC gear teased the stunt across the city and social feeds. During the Club World Cup finals, the giant pigeon launched from Staten Island, passed the Statue of Liberty, headed up the Hudson past MetLife Stadium, looped up to the Bronx and back, then finished at Etihad Park in Queens – NYCFC's future home — with thousands tuning into a livestream of the pigeon's-eye view.
Plymouth City Brand, by DNCO
- Bronze Award: Public Sector
Plymouth's history of exploration, from Charles Darwin to Dame Ellen MacArthur, earned it the nickname "Britain's Ocean City," but that heritage only told half the story. With major national investment underway and 25,000 jobs to fill over the next decade, DNCO's brief was to build a brand that went beyond tourism, raising the city's profile and drawing talent to live and work there, not just visit. The central idea, adventure, drew on Plymouth's unique position between a national park and a national marine park, its high quality of life, and its legacy of exploration, distilled into the tagline "Make life an adventure."
Visually, the team mined the city's navigational heritage – maps, trails, compasses – into a bespoke arrow logo symbolising horizons and optimism, with a nod to Smeaton's Tower lighthouse, alongside a flexible pattern system built from historic contour-line maps. Typography and colour draw on local landmarks, from historic metal signage to the lighthouse's red bands and the rusty orange of Antony Gormley's pier sculpture. Rather than running separate tourism and talent-attraction identities, as most cities do, Plymouth brought both into one system, launching with support from the city's key institutions.
Saboteur, by Saboteur
- Bronze Award: Self-Branding
The original saboteurs threw their wooden clogs — sabots — into industrial machines to resist automation, believing that handmade work from small businesses would outlast mass production. Saboteur, an independent brand studio, has always shared that rebellious, freedom-first spirit, but had never had an identity that reflected it — until the studio realised the idea was hiding in its own name, sabot being the French word for clog and the origin of "saboteur."
The clog now runs through everything: the website, launch film, social presence, email signatures and daily culture, expanded into a whole collection of clogs to reflect the studio's range of ideas and people. Where much self-branding in the sector plays it safe with palette refreshes and manifesto language, this identity is built on a real piece of industrial history, applied with enough range to genuinely set the studio apart.
Saudi Now, by Alphabetical
Bronze Award: Culture, Public Sector, Not-For-Profit, Typography
Saudi Now is a new international platform for collaboration between Saudi Arabia and the UK, spanning arts, film, photography, dance, music, fashion, ideas and education, commissioned by the British Council as a space for two-way cultural exchange. Rather than building separate English and Arabic identities, Alphabetical created a single bilingual wordmark that gives both languages equal weight, expressing dialogue rather than translation.
Working with Arabic type designer Shaqa Bovand ensured the identity was shaped by both cultures equally – Bovand introduced the subtle angle of traditional Arabic calligraphy, and together the team identified the rhombic Noon dot (representing the Arabic letter N, echoing the "N" in Now) as a flexible graphic device that extends into pattern, motion and animation. The brief called for a youthful, accessible identity that would work across digital platforms, and the result lets two languages and cultures coexist as genuine equals rather than one being a translation of the other.
Somer Valley Brewing, by Supple Studio
- Bronze Award: Wine, Beer & Spirits
Somer Valley Brewing grows its own barley using rotational cropping alongside a herd of heritage cows, moves the harvest a short distance down the A36 for traditional floor malting in Warminster, and draws its own water from an on-site bore hole. Supple Studio evolved the brewery's logo and built a visual language around the idea "From our land, to your hand," creating brand assets on the farm itself in collaboration with Bath-based illustrator Simon Spilsbury, who built a suite of textures by printing, rubbing and inking everything from hay bales to tractor wheels before layering in farm-based illustrations. Beer names draw on farmyard sayings and West Country slang, giving the brand a distinct regional voice that carries through packaging and social content – and now the brewery's first taproom, The Welly, launched in 2026.
St John's College Rebrand, by Kit Studio
- Bronze Award: Education
St John's College, Durham needed its own independent visual identity and digital presence, distinct from its parent institution but still true to over a century of history. Rather than compressing that history into a single logo, Kit Studio built a considered system of assets anchored by a coat of arms restored by hand with master craftsman Nathan Yoder, recovering detail that had gradually been lost through years of digital reduction. Alongside the coat of arms sits a refined shield, an SJ monogram, and a wider visual language drawn from the college's architecture and traditions. Archive research, staff and student conversations, and time spent on campus shaped an identity informed by an institution defined as much by warmth and curiosity as academic achievement, extending across the website, social media, print, signage, merchandise and events.
SZCZĘSNY | Amazon Prime Video, by Studio Sutherl&
- Bronze Award: Entertainment
SZCZĘSNY is an Amazon Prime Video documentary following the career of Polish goalkeeper Wojciech Szczęsny across Arsenal, AS Roma, Juventus and FC Barcelona. Studio Sutherl&'s identity and motion graphics are built around Szczęsny's physical ability to fill the goal, using Podium, a variable typeface from Polish foundry Warsaw Capitalics, which expands, compresses and shifts weight to fill the frame as it displays match locations, milestones and title cards.
The wordmark's italicised "Y" nods to a diving save frozen mid-motion, while interstitial graphics turn career statistics into visual textures, giving the identity the feel of both a statistical record and a portrait of a footballing icon. The documentary premiered on Prime Video on 10 October 2025.
The Creative I for Imperial College London, by The Click
- Bronze Award: Education
Higher education is under financial and reputational pressure. Half of UK universities face deficits, and a third of people doubt a degree is worth it, yet the sector still leans on interchangeable heritage crests as shorthand for credibility. Imperial College London, often called "the MIT of Europe," wanted to stop borrowing credibility and own what actually makes it Imperial. The Click's task was to make that repositioning work across 24 independent departments spanning three faculties, historically fragmented after years of working in isolation, while convincing sceptical scientists, engineers and medics rather than marketers.
The solution, The Creative I, was already hiding in the institution's name, carrying a double meaning of "I" the institution and "I" the individual. The team met every department to develop 24 bespoke marks, each abstracted to evoke a feeling rather than illustrate a subject literally, sharing a geometric footprint and single-colour discipline that holds them together as one family across avatars, buildings, patterns and motion, scaled through Frontify so any department can use it.
UEFA EURO 2028, by VML Branding
- Bronze Award: Sport & Leisure
Hosting UEFA Euro 2028 across the UK and Ireland is a statement of intent around social cohesion and passing the game on to the next generation, and VML Branding's central idea, "We All Speak Football," uses the sport as a universal language to unite communities and export those values globally. The identity is born from fans themselves, translating their chants and voices into a flexible visual system built around stadium key visuals and logo "shout" backgrounds, alongside a secondary dynamic sound-wave pattern. The logo itself shows a roar emanating from the trophy as a visible wave of passion, and the colour palette represents the host nations, running from stadium takeovers to digital screens. The project marks the first time a major football brand has used kinetic typography and sound, rather than traditional graphic devices, as its primary visual driver.
Where there's a tree (WWF), by Johnson Banks
- Bronze Award: Copywriting, Not-For-Profit
This project moves WWF UK into new territory, speaking directly to trusts, corporates and philanthropists about its work on tropical rainforest deforestation, now the charity's top strategic priority. The challenge was that most people associate WWF with the orangutans, elephants and pandas that live in these forests, so Johnson Banks needed a new story explaining the link between species and habitat, why it matters to both wildlife and indigenous people, and what's driving deforestation through global supply chains. Rather than the category's usual "doom and gloom" messaging, the campaign opens with just four words: "where there's a tree…", leading with everything a tree, and then a forest, is home to, before pivoting to a punchier message, and showing what's lost, when needed.
Zudo, by DNCO x Victory
- Bronze Award: Illustration
Victory Group and development partner LMTD set out to convert the former ABN AMRO headquarters in Zuidas into a 207,500 sq m site of homes, workspaces, streets and gardens across seven buildings and five towers, completing the district's shift from business zone to city neighbourhood. Once the team landed on "a village for Zuidas" and the name Zudo – a blend of "Zuidas" and the Dutch word for village, "dorp" – the question became what that village should look and feel like.
DNCO and Victory Group worked with illustrator Luis Mendo, a 20-year Amsterdam resident, to build a multi-layered illustration of village life: the neighbourhood baker, the butcher, a local brown café, tulips at a flower cart. Individual scenes can be lifted from the wider illustration for flexibility across hoardings, digital platforms and print, and the system is designed to grow with new scenes and seasonal moments as Zudo develops. Local details only a longtime resident would recognise such as Amsterdammertje bollards, a barrel organ, kids in Ajax kits, a nod to Mayor Femke Halsema and to Rembrandt, root the development in the city's actual culture rather than architectural renderings alone.
