D&AD, a British charity group that seeks to promote good design, awarded Apple three top awards at a ceremony held last night. The company earned two prestigious Black Pencils for the iMac and iPhone, as well as a Yellow Pencil for iPod touch in the Product Design category. The Apple Wireless Keyboard and iPod nano were also nominated for product design.

D&AD has offered awards for outstanding design in a yearly design competition throughout its 45-year history. It awards Yellow Pencils based on judging by juries of design professionals in a variety of creative fields, including advertising, architecture, graphic design, film, and photography. Occasionally, Black Pencils are awarded for truly exceptional works, and some years, the organization doesn't award any at all if no work is deemed worthy enough.

Apple took two of these awards home last night, giving the company a total of six Black Pencils earned since 1999. "This makes the multi-national design company the biggest single winner of Black Pencils in D&AD’s 45-year history," D&AD said in a statement.

Design has always been at the heart of Apple. Steve Jobs once famously said:

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains or the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

While many have often scoffed at paying an "Apple Tax" for cool design, Mac users know that the care and attention to detail are more than skin deep. This recognition of Apple's hard work should further support the fact that design matters, even in a computer.