Welcome to the 20th edition of the Creative Review Annual Awards. In the past two decades, there has been change of seismic proportions – let’s face it, just the past couple of years alone have delivered dramatic shifts in our cultural, social, and personal lives. One of the purposes of the Annual Awards, alongside celebrating the best work from the design and advertising communities, is the chance it offers to observe how these industries reflect global events.

Looking through the various winners over the years – which subscribers to CR can do via our online archive – you can track the influence of the internet, the smartphone, YouTube, and social media on how brands communicate with their audiences, both in terms of the ads they create, and their logos and identities.

You can observe the shift away from the blockbuster TV ad, and the emergence of purpose advertising and brands leaning into socially conscious issues. The rollercoaster ride of the music industry over the past 20 years can be viewed through the work that does – and doesn’t – appear, as well as that of the publishing industry, which briefly seemed extinguished before a golden age of book design grew out of the ashes.

Advertising and commercial design are at the more ephemeral end of the creative industries – while there are many pieces of work that have won in the Annual Awards over the years that have become classics of their genre, there are plenty of others that are hard to recall today – but they do more than any other medium to reflect the ideas that are occupying us in the present moment.

You can guarantee that the ad industry, in particular, will be the first to adopt any new tech trend going, and will likely have moved on long before it reaches the realms of theatre or TV. This speed of change can be dizzying for those working in the industry, but it means that the most creative brands today are at the cutting edge of popular culture.

Advertising and commercial design do more than any other medium to reflect the ideas that are occupying us in the present moment

So what does this year’s crop of winners and honourable mentions reveal about the state of the world right now? We are only three years on from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the various lockdowns that it prompted, and while the ad and design industries might still be reeling from its effects on the workplace, there are no overt signs of it enduring in the projects being produced.

It is there in subtle terms, though. The great wave of new branding identities continues apace: while this began prior to the pandemic as brands realised they needed to refresh their look to deal with the demands of the digital world, and specifically smartphones, this has rapidly increased in the last few years, after many brands’ ecommerce offerings were caught out by the sharp shift to online generated by lockdowns.

Brands from across all sectors have been part of this change. In this year’s winners alone, we can see new branding work for such varied clients as the Girl Scouts of the USA, new food emporium BaseHall Hong Kong, and Big C Charters, a California-based fishing charter that is using impressive type to stand out.

A GOLDEN AGE OF TYPE

Typography in general is in an exciting phase, as we see brands moving away from some of the sans serif approaches that led to accusations of blandness and adopting more dramatic, expressive styles.

These have been used by brands and organisations that you might expect to be dynamic – such as New York’s Vineyard Theatre, with a visual identity that changes for every performance – as well as sectors that tend to be more conservative. UK charity Shelter, for example, is featured in numerous categories across this year’s Annual Awards for its striking identity by Superunion, which features type that is inspired by the worlds of activism and protest.

A vision of how type might be used more commonly in the future can also be gleaned, via Rajshree Saraf’s Typespace font. Specifically designed for use in augmented reality projects, it can be customised in real time so it can respond to the individual, real-life environments it appears in.

THE RETURN OF HUMOUR 

While just a few years ago brands were determined to use their marketing to show their value to the world in terms of social purpose, 2022 saw a determined shift towards a more light-hearted style of communications. Perhaps prompted by a realisation that with a global economic crisis and war in Ukraine, consumers needed entertainment more than earnestness from brands, we’ve seen a slow return of comedy and fun.

This could be witnessed particularly in the travel industry, which embraced creativity in a bid to draw customers back post-pandemic. Uncommon Creative Studio’s campaign for British Airways featured over 500 executions that riffed on reasons for travel other than the typical ‘business or leisure’, while holiday rentals platform Plum Guide released a sharply funny set of ads that drew attention to the need to holiday before you die.

THE RISE OF PRACTICAL PURPOSE

There were still plenty of projects from brands dedicated to making the world a better place too, though these seemed rooted less in the virtue signalling we’ve witnessed a bit too much of in recent years and instead in more practical, authentic work. Apple’s The Greatest ad, for example, was an emotional portrait of how its technology can make life more accessible to those living with vision, hearing, mobility, or cognitive impairments, while using an episode of the BBC’s phenomenally successful children’s show Hey Duggee to help welcome children from Ukraine to the UK was a thoughtful, and very practical, gesture for those displaced by war.

Google Seed Studio’s Little Signals project, meanwhile, suggests ways in which our technology can be redesigned to support rather than pester us, while the government of Tuvalu embraced the metaverse – 2022’s trendiest topic – to highlight the threat that climate change brings to the atoll, which risks being subsumed by rising sea levels in a matter of decades.

Humour and purpose then came together in beautiful unison for Relate’s Hornicultural Society project, which aims to raise awareness of sexual health in the over 60s. Featuring both beautiful design and witty euphemisms galore, the campaign delivered its message with charm and style, and an inspired lack of condescension.

As always, this year’s Annual Awards feature work from across a wide spectrum of media and contain a vast array of ideas. But if you are looking for a common thread that links all the work here, and in fact all the Annual Awards winners of the past 20 years, it would be excellence. There are a number of awards schemes that honour the work of the advertising and design industries, but what makes CR’s unique is our focus on innovation, quality, and originality.

Whether it appeared in our very first Annual 20 years ago, or among today’s list of winners, the work featured here should make you feel a little bit jealous, and a lot inspired. Long may this continue.

View all the Winners and Honourable Mentions from the 2023 Annual Awards at creativereview.co.uk/annual-awards-2023/