The D&AD Trend Report, a yearly free resource for the creative community, has landed. Capturing insights from over 300 of the world’s best designers, advertising minds and creatives, we uncovered six nascent trends that are dominating the commercial creative industry and its ever-growing community. Dive in to see what they are.
Every year in May, D&AD invites some of the brightest minds working in the commercial creative industries to London. Over the course of three days, these leaders from the fields of advertising, design, film, and more debate and deliberate to decide who will receive a coveted D&AD Pencil, regarded by many in our industry as the pinnacle award of their careers.
This year, our jurors evaluated over 30,000 submissions from 86 countries worldwide. However, it’s not just about the awarded Pencils. To capture insights from the jury rooms and the work submitted, we analyzed six emerging trends that stood out, reflecting the patterns of change in the wider world. From creators becoming architects of entire brand campaigns to gaming fast becoming a platform to change perceptions, challenge biases, and increase inclusion, here are this year’s standout trends.
In 2025, D&AD jurors didn’t just hone in on brilliant, visual ideas and exceptional craft, they looked for the impact design delivered for business growth, transformation, and behavioral change. The work that stood out focused on the business challenge, applying creative processes that clearly understood client needs and helped brands forge deeper connections with the communities they serve, delivering impact felt far beyond the initial launch. This was exemplified in campaigns like the multi-Yellow-Pencil-winning ‘Price Packs’, which uses a design concept that boldly places price front and center to attract consumers during a cost-of-living crisis, and ‘Space Trash Signs’, which visualizes the consequences of space pollution with constellations made from space debris.
2. The emotive screen
According to the Dentsu Gaming Report 2025, the gaming industry draws less than 5% of global ad spend, despite 3.4 billion players, highlighting a huge opportunity for brands. Once playing on the sidelines of culture, the D&AD report shows how gaming has quickly gone mainstream, driven, in part, by the rise in mobile games, interactive platforms like Twitch, and virtual reality’s growing capabilities, as seen in Apple Vision Pro’s Pencil-winning film, Submerged.
3. Full-service creator
A new era of influence has arrived, with 61% of consumers saying they trust recommendations from creators more than they trust brand advertising, according to Sprout Social research from this year. As a result, the influencer of yesteryear, who partnered with brands through simple, transactional collaborations, is quickly being replaced by the full-service creator. Now, architects of entire brand campaigns – from brief, to script, to production – they control the narrative, led by their fans.
4. Unmistakably human
This year’s standout ideas in D&AD award-winning work were those that embraced what it truly means to be human: irrational, absurd, weird, wacky, and always emotional. There was a rebellious resurgence of the handmade, and the work was distinctively human in idea and execution, putting the person into personality. The message was clear: in a landscape filled with bland and automated creative, it’s human feeling, impeccable craft, and offbeat thinking – the stuff a machine could never conceive – that rises to the top.
5. Brand DNA
Winning work in D&AD’s Brand Identity Refresh category reinvigorated existing brand identities, while staying true to the essence, which jury president Frederico Gelli, founder and chief executive officer of Tátil Design, described as the connection between “originality and origin.”Rather than leaning on established design codes, work this year connected brand heritage and modernity, boldly experimenting and playing with form and meaning. Pencil winners underscored that brands that understand their core DNA can experiment more freely. For example, at the core of the identity for Nike Run was a new mark with a storied history: the RUNSWOOSH. Taking inspiration from an iconic Nike lockup, dating back to the 1980s, the brand name was replaced in the original with a simple and declarative “RUN”. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola’s ‘Thanks for Coke Creating’ relinquished control of its 139-year-old logo, allowing audiences to reinvent it.
6. Radical candour
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 80% of people trust brands they use, which is more than those who trust in business, media, government, NGOs, and their employer. Additionally, 61% of people globally feel betrayed by leaders and left behind by the societal institutions meant to support and serve the public. Trust is hard currency, and the brands that show themselves to be irrefutably transparent build loyalty. We have entered the era of radical candour, where to win over world-weary consumers, brands are wearing their truth. This could be seen in campaigns like ‘Never Just a Period’, which was described by Libresse as “the gap between what we’re told and what it’s actually like” to have your period, and ‘Bundles of Joy’, a divisive work that sparked an international debate about motherhood, misogyny, and female representation in advertising.
Download the D&AD Trend Report to learn what our takeaways were from these six trends and how brands, agencies, and creatives can stay ahead of the curve.
