It's Nice That has launched the 2026 edition of Ones to Watch, its annual talent directory, selecting seventy-two emerging creatives from sixteen countries from a record pool of applications. The directory spans graphic design, illustration, animation, artists, filmmakers and photographers, offering a cross-section of the people and practices shaping visual culture in the year ahead. The organisation reports that applications roughly doubled compared with the 2025 edition -- a measure both of the programme's growing reach and of the competitive pressure bearing down on young creatives. Ones to Watch functions less as a ranking than as a showcase and matchmaking service: each selected creative receives a profile and a platform, framed as an open invitation to creative directors, commissioners and collaborators to discover new talent early. For those chosen, it can mean the difference between obscurity and a first major commission. Now established as a fixture of the creative calendar, the directory has become one of the more reliable annual snapshots of where emerging practice is heading. Read as a whole, each year's list doubles as a map of the industry's shifting centre of gravity -- which disciplines are rising, which countries are producing the most exciting work, and what the next visual mainstream might look like. For commissioners, it is a shortcut through the noise; for the selected, a signal that the industry is watching. In a year when entry-level creative work is under pressure from every direction, a directory that puts names and faces in front of commissioners may matter more than ever.