D&AD Festival 2025, Day 2 — South Bank Centre, London: Excel Reborn, Empires Rewired — 2025’s Design Uprising in Two Acts
FCB New York win Advertising Agency of the Year
The Big Winners
FCB NYC sweeps D&AD 2025 with their digital masterpiece “Spreadbeats”
The campaign started where inspiration usually flat-lines: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. FCB New York asked, “What if the rows could riff?” The answer became “Spreadbeats”, a fully playable music sequencer built with nothing but conditional formatting, formulas, and a smuggled-in chunk of JavaScript. Type a budget figure and the cell turns into a kick drum; paste a media schedule and hi-hats start snapping. The file shipped to Spotify’s ad-sales leads as a self-running demo, proof that even media math can drop a chorus.
Judges at D&AD 2025 didn’t just clap; they emptied the trophy cabinet. “Spreadbeats” claimed the show’s highest honour, a Black Pencil in Digital Design / Digital Experiences. It kept swinging:
Yellow Pencils for Art Direction / Digital Content, Illustration / Digital, and Media / Direct
Graphite Pencils for Animation / Motion Design and Digital Design Craft
Six Pencils from a single Excel file would be news on its own, but the ripple effect was bigger. Those points propelled FCB New York to Advertising Agency of the Year and locked in FCB as Network of the Year, an accolade the network hasn’t held since 2022.
Context sharpens the edge. Only two other projects reached Black-Pencil altitude this year: the kinetic identity for Paris 2024 and a surrealist A$AP Rocky music video. Both are heavy on budget and bleeding-edge tech. “Spreadbeats,” by contrast, weaponised a 1990s office tool everyone already owns. Its craft lives in constraint: 256-color cells, monospace fonts, and perfect frame-rates. Creative Review dubbed it “innovation through nostalgic technologies,” a line that sums up why the work hit a nerve.
The takeaway isn’t that Excel is the new After Effects. It’s that originality often hides in the least glamorous corners of the software stack. By reframing an admin chore as a hands-on beat machine, FCB turned functional familiarity into emotional surprise—and reminded a very jaded industry that great digital ideas don’t always need LIDAR scans or cloud budgets. Sometimes they just need a grid, a groove, and a willingness to see blank cells as blank bars.
My standout Day 2 Presentations
Deep Dive: Two Minds, One Creative Fault-Line
James Taylor presents at D&AD 2025
Morning session: James Taylor, Global Head of Design at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, unfurls “All Ideas Are Bad Ideas (Until Designed).”
Late-afternoon slot: Teemu Suviala, Global CCO at Landor | WPP, drops “Experience Is Everything: Design for Emotions, Memories, and Meaning.”
They never shared a stage, but their ideas now collide here—because contrasts sharpen insight. Strap in.
Teemu Suviala presents at D&AD 2025
1. Where Ideas Begin
James Taylor opens with a blunt provocation: design is the operating system of modern communication, not a layer you install after strategy is done compiling. He shows how Apple campaigns place designers in the very first briefing so that a single visual logic: AirPods as musical punctuation, a lone lock-icon for privacy, guides every language and market. Later that day Teemu Suviala walks on stage carrying a slip of paper headed “Exit Song.” He asks the audience to choose the track that would play at their own funeral, then argues that if a brand can’t make you feel something worthy of that playlist, it’s disposable. For Suviala, creativity starts with empathy and mortality: design must earn its place in a human life before it earns space on a slide deck. Taylor begins at the whiteboard; Suviala begins at the pulse.
2. Crafting the Signal
Taylor’s mantra is ruthless clarity. Attention spans are measured in thumb-scrolls, so he strips campaigns to a single, instantly legible asset. His example: a billboard that’s 90 percent white space and 10 percent icon, readable at freeway speed in Shanghai or São Paulo. Suviala embraces the opposite physics. In a media landscape fractured across screens, headphones, and sensors, he wants brands to behave like multi-sensory ecosystems. He cites Coca-Cola’s open-source ribbon, re-drawn by local artists in 30+ countries, and a Landor project that turned cereal boxes into playable MIDI controllers. Perfection, he contends, is less memorable than a deliberately rough edge that invites participation. The gap between them is not minimal vs. maximal but single-channel precision versus orchestrated immersion.
3. Relationship with Technology
For Taylor, tech is a silent tool: automate the mundane, accelerate the craft, then get out of the audience’s way. If a second of load time blunts comprehension, the feature dies. Suviala treats the same circuitry as a duet partner. He shows robotic paint arms spraying brand gradients, AI engines remixing medieval art into retail displays, and a VR prototype where Meta’s infinity loop bends with the user’s breathing rate. Technology, he says, should misbehave just enough to spark wonder - “a collaborator that never sleeps, not a gimmick that steals focus.” Both distrust tech fetishism; their divergence is whether the code hides backstage or bows alongside the band.
4. How Teams Should Work
Taylor lobs a cultural Molotov: abolish the separate “design department”. In his model, planners wireframe, art directors tweak type, and legal reviews motion tests in real time. Cross-breeding talent is the safeguard against silos that dilute ideas. Suviala is less concerned with seating charts than with intellectual metabolism. He hires polymaths who can trace gothic calligraphy one day and hack Raspberry Pi firmware the next, insisting that “curiosity indexes higher than credentials”. Where Taylor rewrites the org chart, Suviala rewires the hiring algorithm; both aim to keep projects porous and restless.
5. Measuring Impact
Taylor optimises for the moment of impact: does the asset brand the retina before the swipe? His success metric is instantaneous distinctiveness. Suviala wages a longer bet. He shows a custom tombstone etched with fractal waveforms—proof, he says, that design should leave a trace people still talk about when the servers are gone. Brands, in his view, must become living systems: hyper-personalised, generative, evolving with every user touch. Taylor designs for the blink; Suviala designs for the memory that surfaces decades later. The tension between their horizons, micro-second versus lifetime, poses the real brief for the rest of us: craft work that wins both the scroll and the story.
In the end, Taylor and Suviala sketch the same horizon from opposite ends of the spectrum: one begins with the disciplined stroke that cuts through noise; the other, with the open embrace that floods every sense. Their collision reminds us that modern creativity is neither purely an act of reduction nor pure immersion, it’s a deliberate swing between the two. When we pair Taylor’s razor-sharp insistence on instant recognisability with Suviala’s expansive quest for lasting emotion, we unlock work that owns the blink and the memory. That fusion is where brands stop behaving like campaigns and start living like experiences - brief, bold flashes that echo long after the screen goes dark.
Five Rebel Outtakes—sharpened for seasoned hands
1. Anchor every project in a visceral promise.
Before anyone opens Keynote, capture two sentences: the emotion your audience must feel and the single visual, sonic, or spatial cue that can trigger it. This pairing—emotion plus cue—becomes the centre of gravity for everything that follows. It’s Taylor’s demand for upstream design discipline fused with Suviala’s insistence on empathy. When that promise is clear, scope changes can stretch execution but never snap intent.
2. Subject your work to the one-second test.
Print the concept, tape it to the wall, take three steps back, and give yourself a heartbeat. If the point doesn’t land immediately, reduce until it does. This exercise isn’t minimalism for its own sake; it protects distinctiveness when your idea is competing with a million notifications. Taylor uses it to slash noise, but even Suviala’s layered ecosystems start with a signal strong enough to survive compression.
3. Prototype in multiple senses from day one.
Modern brands are experienced, not merely viewed. Add a rough sound bed, a haptic cue, or an AR overlay in the very first sprint, even if it’s crude. Early multisensory exploration forces bigger thinking and uncovers interactions a static comp could never reveal. Suviala’s portfolio proves that the richest experiences emerge when design teams think in atmospheres, not assets.
4. Treat technology as an equal partner, not a gadget.
Bring code and hardware into the creative conversation early and push them to misbehave. A generative script, a robotic arm, or a browser extension can uncover visual or behavioural quirks that become signature touches. Keep Taylor’s rule of friction—if the tech slows comprehension, it’s gone—but embrace Suviala’s philosophy that unexpected machine behaviour can spark the delight humans remember.
5. Optimise for both flash and echo.
Great work owns the instant and lingers in the mind. Track distinctiveness (does it brand the retina in a blink?) alongside resonance (does it surface unprompted weeks later?). Build cross-trained teams so planners sketch, designers write copy, and curiosity stays high. Finally, apply the “retirement-reel test”: would you proudly show this piece at the end of your career? If not, keep refining until the answer is an unqualified yes.
