2024 season · historical cohort

Six teams. One week. One trophy.

The 2024 GenNext Finals ran from 19 to 25 June, hosted at the 24G Creators' Forum. Six teams from four continents made the cut. One walked away with the Award of Excellence. Their names stay here. Their certificates still verify. The 2026 Finals will write a new list — they have not happened yet, and we will not invent them.

How a team becomes a finalist

Finals are not a popularity vote and they are not a surprise shortlist announced from a stage. Cumulative scores from the Production rounds produce a global ranking. The top six teams are invited, subject to one team per school. If two teams from the same school both sit inside those six, the school names one. Independent teams count as their own school. Mentors who advised a team in a given round do not score that team. The live week is a new brief, not a victory lap through old PDFs.

That process is the same spine 2026 will use, with six disciplines instead of five, and with the five-lens rubric published on the Judging page. If you are entering this year, do not reverse-engineer the 2024 scorecard as if it were a formula. The briefs change. The chairs rotate. What does not change is that incomplete or late work is not scored, and that a certificate follows only those results we are willing to put an ID on.

What winning leads to

The Award of Excellence is a trophy, a place on this page, a share of the season prize pool as published in the Finals pack, and a certificate with a unique ID. Category chips mark the team that led a discipline during the season. Finalist certificates mark the six. None of this is a job offer, a visa, or an affiliation with D&AD, Cannes, ADC or anyone else on The Field.

What it has led to, in practice, is a file a creative director can open in five minutes, plus a public verifier a HR team can use without calling us. Some 2024 finalists have written to say the week changed how they work. We are glad. We still will not invent biographies around the names below.

How the certificates work

Each listed team received paper and PDF certificates for named members. The ID on the bottom edge resolves on Verify Certificate. Sample 2024 IDs are published on that page so you can see a live record. If a PDF is missing, write to verify@24g.org. If a file has no ID, it is not ours.

2024 Champion

Wonders.

A four-person team out of Massey University, Auckland. Their final-week brief response on cultural identity in digital advertising swept three of the five 2024 categories. Certificates issued 25 June 2024 remain verifiable.

Best in Visual Graphics Best in Brand Storytelling Award of Excellence

The cohort

The 2024 finalist teams.

Listed in alphabetical order of team name, with the champion marked. We keep these six and we do not add fictional extra winners around them.

02 · BRAND STORYTELLING

CQUNB

Chongqing University · China

06 · VISUAL GRAPHICS

Eco Advance

Taylor's University · Malaysia

04 · WEB & UI

Greenwich Studio

University of Greenwich · UK

03 · DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

Harsa Bayanaka

University of Indonesia · Indonesia

05 · MOTION DESIGN

Welly Collective

Wellington Institute of Technology · NZ

★ 01 · CHAMPION

Wonders

Massey University · New Zealand

Season scorecard

Six 2024 briefs. The leaderboard.

Each round, the jury returned scores across the five criteria then in force. Briefs in order, with the top team called out. 2026 briefs are a new set — see the Briefs page.

ROUND 01

Visual Identity

Brief: rebrand a public library service for under-18s.
Top team: Wonders

ROUND 02

Motion & Title Design

Brief: title sequence for a fictional climate-fiction series.
Top team: Welly Collective

ROUND 03

Editorial Illustration

Brief: cover story for a long-read on attention online.
Top team: Harsa Bayanaka

ROUND 04

Web & UI

Brief: onboarding flow for a youth mental-health charity.
Top team: Greenwich Studio

ROUND 05

Brand Storytelling

Brief: cross-channel campaign for an independent music label.
Top team: CQUNB

ROUND 06 · LIVE FINAL

Final Pitch

Brief: an open prompt on cultural identity in digital advertising.
Champion: Wonders

Platform partner

Bluebeam supported every 2024 brief.

Bluebeam joined GenNext 2024 as a platform partner — providing markup, review and collaboration tools that turn rough thinking into presentation-ready creative work. Their team also ran mentor sessions during Foundations. They remain a named partner for 2026. They are not a juror of record and they are not a client on the briefs.

Portfolio and authorship notes

Historical finalist names stay as already published. Do not add a person this page does not already name.

Contribution. Who designed, who motioned, who wrote. A member who only chose the typeface should say so.
Citation. Type, image, sound, code you did not make — named and licensed.
Making. One paragraph of the process pack, not a moodboard dump.
AI use. Tool, date, task, and what it did not do. Undeclared generative fills fail craft.
Reflection. One thing you would not do again. Not a press line.