Home / ADC Awards

ADC 101st ANNUAL AWARDS

The ADC Annual Awards, celebrating 101 years of excellence in design and craft, is now open for entries! This iconic design and advertising awards show honors the best creative talent and groundbreaking work across many different creative disciplines, from graphic design to illustration, from publishing to packaging, from advertising to photography and all points in between.

Jury Announced! ADC has announced top creatives from around the world who will serve on the jury for the ADC 101st Annual Awards.

Along with this year’s jury chairs announced last month, nearly 250 highly-qualified creatives from 49 countries will judge work from around the world.

Important Dates

Regular Deadline
January 31, 2022

Extended Deadline
February 18, 2022

Final Extended Deadline

March 4, 2022

A group of seven talented illustrators, animators and artists from around the world have been selected to showcase what’s behind their great work as part of the ADC 101st Annual Awards call for entries, developed by DDB Paris.

Using the theme “Creativity 101 - Each Cube Has a Story to Tell”, the series focuses on how creatives go through all states of mind when searching for an award-winning idea, and depicts the unique story behind a great piece of work.

Be sure to check out other artists' "internal Cube stories" over the coming weeks, but don't forget to enter ADC 101 as well. After all, your work has its own story to tell.

For me, music is an essential element for the creative process. It’s a huge source of inspiration that helps me to build my universe, create ideas and motivate myself. There is nothing better than Phil Collins’ song to start the day to create! - Alexandre Nart

Ideas can come to mind anytime and anywhere, especially when you don’t expect it. This piece is inspired by new ways of thinking, the search for creative ideas, questioning dos and don’ts and the need of breaking new ground betimes. My ideas normally come to mind whenever not being on my desk, let it be in bed trying to fall asleep, in the subway staring around or in the kitchen wondering what to cook with what’s there, foremost when my mind is on pause and not necessarily aiming to find new ideas. - Max Guther

My creative process begins by tapping into my inner pool of resources comprising fragmented thoughts, images, knowledge, and information that I accumulated over the years. I then try to connect the dots among seemingly unrelated sources or combine them to create something fresh and extraordinary. I always perceived this process of creative thinking as a messy, endless chatter amongst my inner resources. And the image is a visualization of my mind attempting to grasp a new idea while disarrayed, internal conversations are being made. - Dani Choi

The first ADC gold medal winning work in 1921

ADC 100TH HISTORIC TIMELINE

On August 13, 2020, the 100th anniversary date of the incorporation of the Art Directors Club of New York, ADC launched a year-long ADC100 centennial celebration, kicked off with a special identity and online historic timeline developed by multi-specialty creative studio C&G Partners, New York.

The ADC100 program provided rare insights into the observations and human exchanges of the creative community throughout the past century. Serialized monthly content traced the history of ADC, and by extension told the story of how the graphic design and advertising professions evolved during major global events including recessions, world wars and shifts in consumer lifestyles.

The Art Directors Club, known as ADC, was the first global organization to celebrate and award leaders in creative communications. Founded in New York by Louis Pedlar on August 13, 1920, the club was established to ensure advertising and graphic design was judged by the same stringent standards as fine art.

ADC organized the first juried exhibition of advertising art in 1921 to, in the words of ad and graphic design legend Earnest Elmo Calkins, "dignify the field of business art in the eyes of artists" and communicate that "artistic excellence is vitally necessary to successful advertising." The ADC Annual Awards is the world's longest continuously running design and advertising awards show recognizing global excellence in craft and innovation.

ADC 101ST Partner

ADC will for the third year partner with the creative community Working Not Working on event and content collaborations, as well as special awards including the Freelancer of the Year, which was won in 2021 by film editor Mah Ferraz. All ADC 101st Annual Awards Gold Cube-winning entries submitted through the freelance level of the show's tiered pricing structure will be judged again by a separate jury that includes the Working Not Working community.