Eligibility, teams, AI, IP, certificates, deadlines.

You must be aged 14–24 on 31 January 2026 and currently enrolled in a secondary school, further-education college, undergraduate programme, or a recognised equivalent. Home-educated students in Band A may enter with a coordinator adult. Gap-year students may enter Band B if they can evidence enrolment in the 2025–26 or 2026–27 academic year. You do not need to study "design" as a named subject — illustration, film, computing, architecture and self-directed portfolios all qualify if the enrolment test is met.

Residency is worldwide. We do not require a visa, a UK address, or English as a first language. Briefs are published in English and Chinese; you may submit in either, or bilingual. What we cannot do is score a film whose entire meaning lives in a language none of the round panel can read — in that case, provide captions or a translation sheet.

Teams are two to five people. Solo entries are not accepted, because the season is built as a studio, not as a lonely genius contest. One captain submits, receives critiques, and is the contact for fees and certificates. Members can sit in different cities; they cannot sit in different age bands unless the team accepts Band B rules (any 18+ member pulls the team into Band B).

A school may register up to five teams. Only one team per school may be put forward to Finals. If two school teams both rank inside the top six globally, the school chooses, in writing, which team goes. Independent teams with no school — a weekend collective, a community workshop — are welcome; they count as their own "school" for the Finals cap.

£375 for one team. Schools entering more than one team pay a sliding total up to £1,125 for five. VAT applies in the UK and EU. The fee covers portal access, asset packs, mentor hours in Foundations, jury critiques, and — if you reach that stage — a Finals certificate process. Travel to the Creators' Forum is not included; we publish a small travel-support note with Finals invitations.

Fee-waiver places run every season for schools and independent teams that would otherwise not enter. There is no separate "poverty essay". Tick the waiver box on the registration form, name a coordinator, and tell us in a short paragraph what would fail without it. Waivers are not advertised as a prize; they are a design decision about who gets to be in the room.

Registration is open now. Teams that complete registration by 12 January 2026, 17:00 GMT, get first pick of Foundations briefs. Registration closes 26 January 2026, 17:00 GMT. Foundations opens 31 January. Production Round 1 opens 23 February. Subsequent rounds run in two-week blocks through 17 May. Finals week is 19–27 June 2026, with the live pitch at the 24G Creators' Forum. Certificate IDs for 2026 finalists and category winners are issued the week after Finals.

Round close is always Friday 17:00 GMT of week two. The portal does not accept late files. If your time zone makes Friday evening impossible, submit earlier; we do not run local-time exceptions. School exam clashes are real — choose which rounds you can staff rather than begging a window after the fact.

Yes, unless your team reached the Finals in the last season you competed. Finalists sit out one public season. Category winners who did not reach Finals may return. Changing two or more members does not reset a Finals ban if the captain and the school are the same; write to us if the team has genuinely dissolved. We encourage returners. Most of the strongest 2024 work came from people who already knew how a two-week brief feels.

As a research or production assistant, declared in the credits with a plain description of what the tool did — yes. As a substitute for authorship — no. Undeclared generated images, film, interface copy or code that constitute the primary artefact are a disqualification, not a slap on the wrist. Prompts of the form "in the style of [living artist]" are prohibited. Training a model on a teammate's unpublished drawings without their consent is prohibited.

The test we use in the room is simple: can the team explain the decisions that remain when the tool is subtracted? If the answer is a shrug, craft and authorship both fail. The full wording is on the Judging page.

You own your work. 24G does not claim copyright in student submissions. By entering, you grant 24G a limited licence to display the work for the season, in the archive, in educational settings, and in certificate and press contexts, always with team credit. We will not sell your campaign to a brand. We will not enter your piece into another competition in our name.

You must have the rights to everything you submit: music, type, photography, trademarks, data. Uncleared commercial music is an automatic feasibility fail. Do not use real brand marks as if they had commissioned you. The fictional organisations in the 2026 briefs are 24G's; they are not invitations to infringe a lookalike.

Finalists and category winners receive a certificate with a unique ID printed on the bottom edge. The public verifier on this site — and the certificate tool at cert/verify.html — will return the holder, team, school, award, category, season and issue date. If a PDF is on file, you can open it. 2024 certificates remain live. A certificate can be revoked if we later find a serious integrity breach; revocation is visible as "not found" plus a note if you write to verify@24g.org.

We do not sell replacement certificates to people who did not compete. We do not issue "participation NFTs". If an employer is looking at a file that has no ID, it is not a GenNext certificate.

Registration is not a portfolio review. We need team name, captain contact, school or independent status, age band, country, member list with dates of birth (month and year is enough), and a coordinator if anyone is under 18. You may optionally link existing work so your mentor has a sense of you. That link is not scored and will not keep you out.

What is scored is the brief response. For each round, follow the deliverable list on the Briefs page. As a habit: a strategy note, the artefact, process, and credits. File specs (duration, page count, codec, Figma link versus PDF) are in the workspace when the round opens. A 90-page "process book" that hides a weak idea is not craft; it is camouflage.

No. Registered teams receive a Bluebeam workspace, Figma educational seats, and a curated asset pack. Use whatever you already use — analogue drawing, open-source tools, a phone camera, code. We score the thinking and the discipline-specific craft. We do not score your subscription stack. If a deliverable asks for a prototype, a PDF of the flow plus a recorded walkthrough is acceptable when Figma is not available; say so in the notes.

Foundations includes scheduled mentor hours. Production rounds include one mid-round check. Mentors are working practitioners. Their job is to test whether you have read the constraint, not to art-direct you into their own portfolio. A mentor who draws over your file has broken the ethics rule; tell us. Mentors do not score the teams they advised in that round.

Write to the portal before the next round closes. Teams may not drop below two or rise above five. A new member must still meet eligibility and must not be sitting on another 2026 team. Certificate names are locked at Finals week; if you want a member on the paper, they must still be on the team then.

No. Those programmes — D&AD New Blood, ADC Young Guns, Cannes Lions Young Lions, The One Show Young Ones, YCN Student Awards, Adobe Design Achievement Awards — are described on The Field as the landscape students already compare us with. They are not partners, parents, or prize pathways of 24G. Do not put their marks on your GenNext work. Do not tell an employer that a GenNext certificate is a Pencil, a Cube, or a Lion.

Cumulative Production scores, one team per school, top six globally. Finals week is a new live brief and a pitch at the Creators' Forum, 19–27 June 2026. The Award of Excellence, category chips and finalist certificates are the public outcome. There is a prize pool of £40,000 across the season, allocated as published in the Finals pack. We do not promise internships we do not have in writing. We do promise a verifiable record and a critique you can learn from. The 2024 champion, Wonders of Massey University, is still listed on the Finalists page; that is the precedent, not a guarantee of the same press.

Anyone under 18 needs a coordinator adult and parental or guardian consent at registration. We do not publish home addresses. Team photographs on the Finalists page are used with the consent given at Finals. Mental-health and youth briefs (including Soft Landing) are exercises in service design, not invitations to disclose personal medical information in a deck. If a submission concerns us as a welfare matter, we will contact the coordinator, not the public internet. Privacy detail is on the Privacy page.

General and registration: hello@24g.org. Live brief clarifications: briefs@24g.org (copied to all teams if the constraint changes). Certificates: verify@24g.org. Press: press@24g.org. The Contact page has the same list plus a form. We do not have a public phone tree; email is the record.