About GenNext

数字创意多轮任务 · digital-creative multi-round briefs.

Closing the gap between studying design and doing it.

Most students leave school without a body of work a creative director can read in five minutes. Most studios do not have a way to find young talent before someone else has signed them. GenNext exists to fix both ends of that.

The format

A competition built like a studio season, not a portfolio dump.

Student competitions often reward a single polished artefact: a poster that never had a client, a film that never had a brief, an app screen that never had a user. That work can be beautiful. It is also easy to fake, easy to overfit to last year's winners, and hard for a working creative director to trust.

GenNext inverts the sequence. We publish the brief. We publish the audience, the constraint, the deliverable and the rubric. Teams work through research, concept, iteration and presentation — the same arc a junior team would ride inside an agency, compressed into two weeks. The jury scores the thinking as much as the final pixel.

That is why we do not ask for a "best of" portfolio at entry. Your existing work may be excellent. It is not what we are judging. We are judging how you behave when the problem is not yours to choose.

A short history of the format

How GenNext grew into a six-round season.

24G built GenNext as a worldwide digital-creative competition for students aged 14–24. The first public seasons ran as a five-category programme — Visual Graphics, Motion Design, Web & UI, Digital Illustration and Brand Storytelling — with a Foundations warm-up, a scored Production phase, and a live Finals week at the 24G Creators' Forum.

The 2024 season is the cohort we still show. Sixty-eight countries. 1,240 teams. Six live briefs. A £40,000 prize pool. Six finalist teams from four continents, and a champion — Wonders, from Massey University in Auckland — whose work on cultural identity in digital advertising took Best in Visual Graphics, Best in Brand Storytelling, and the Award of Excellence. Those names remain on the Finalists page. Their certificates remain in the public verifier. We do not invent extra biographies around them.

The 2026 season keeps that spine and adds a sixth discipline, Experiential, while renaming Web & UI to Digital Product and Brand Storytelling to Storytelling/Film so the labels match how studios actually staff a job. The judging lenses are also sharper this year: insight, idea, craft, cultural tension and feasibility. The ethics rule on generative tools is written in public, not whispered in a briefing. The certificate remains the last artefact of the season — unique ID, holder, category, date — because an award that cannot be checked is just a PDF.

We are not a replacement for a degree, a union, or a first job. We are a season. If you want to know where that season sits next to D&AD New Blood, ADC Young Guns, Cannes Lions Young Lions, The One Show Young Ones, YCN Student Awards or the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, read The Field. Those programmes are peers in a landscape. They are not 24G partners, affiliates or sponsors.

Values

What we will not trade away.

A student competition can drift into spectacle, into unpaid labour for brands, or into a closed circuit of the already-connected. These five commitments are how we try not to.

01 · Briefs before brands

The problem is the point.

We write industry-style briefs. We do not sell student labour to unnamed clients, and we do not name living brands as official sponsors unless they are already on this site.

02 · Critique, not mystery

The rubric is in the PDF.

Every round publishes the five lenses in advance. After scoring, the chair returns a written note. If you cannot see why you ranked where you ranked, we have failed, not you.

03 · Authorship is named

Tools are allowed. Ghosting is not.

Mentors advise; they do not draw. Generative systems may assist if declared. A team that cannot explain its own decisions does not pass craft.

04 · Access is a design problem

Fee waivers, seats, and time zones.

We run fee-waiver places every season. Tools are provided. Deadlines are GMT and published months ahead so a school in a different hemisphere can plan.

05 · Proof over prestige

A certificate you can check.

We would rather be a small, verifiable record than a large, uncheckable claim. If we issued it, the ID works on the public verifier.

→ Open

Read the 2026 briefs.

Six live problems. Constraints, audiences, deliverables. No mystery client.

Brief library

The work

Real briefs, weighed by people who write them for a living.

Across the 2026 season, teams respond to authentic briefs across Visual Graphics, Motion Design, Illustration, Storytelling/Film, Digital Product and Experiential. Each one comes with the materials a working studio gets on day one — context, audience, deliverables, constraints and reference. Brand-name sponsors are not implied.

The judging panel rotates each round and includes working creative directors, illustrators, motion artists and product leads. They score on the lens they apply at work. After every round they return a written critique alongside the score — so by the time you reach the Finals, you have built both a portfolio and a read on how to keep getting better.

Full criteria, process and ethics live on the Judging page. Eligibility, teams, AI, IP and deadlines live on the FAQ.

Who can enter

A competition built to welcome the unconnected.

GenNext is open to currently-enrolled students aged 14–24, in teams of two to five. We actively recruit young women, self-taught creators and students from communities under-represented in creative industries.

Age band A

14–17

High-school teams. Slightly shorter briefs, the same five judging lenses. School coordinator required. Parental consent is part of registration.

Age band B

18–24

Undergraduate and further-education teams. Full-length briefs and access to all six categories. Evidence of current enrolment is required.

Mixed teams

Cross-age

Mixed-age teams compete in Band B if any member is 18 or over. We encourage it — younger makers on senior teams consistently lift the work.

Partners

Tools in your hands. A forum at the end.

GenNext is built with a small, named roster. We do not list peer competitions as partners. If a name is not on this page, do not assume a relationship.

Platform partner

Bluebeam

Markup, review and collaboration tools for every registered team. Bluebeam also runs mentor sessions during Foundations.

Education partner

Figma for Education

Free educational seats for every team — for Digital Product briefs and day-to-day collaboration.

Network

The Creators' Forum

Finalists are hosted at the annual 24G Creators' Forum, where the live pitch round takes place in June 2026.