Award Winner
HAYASHI Noriaki

Publication
Graphic Design in Japan 2025 (July 2025)

Award Ceremony
JAGDA General Assembly on 27 June 2025 in Tokyo

Exhibition
Graphic Design in Japan 2025
Friday 27 June – Thursday 7 August 2025 | Tokyo Midtown Design Hub

2025 JAGDA Exhibition: Yusaku Kamekura Design Award and JAGDA New Designer Award
Tuesday 15 July – Wednesday 27 August 2025 | Ginza Graphic Gallery

Selection Process of the 25th Yusaku Kamekura Design Award

The Yusaku Kamekura Design Award was established in 1999 to commemorate the achievements of Yusaku Kamekura (1915–1997), JAGDA’s first president, and to contribute to the ongoing development of graphic design. The award was made possible through a generous donation from Mr. Kamekura’s family. It is presented each year to the work judged most outstanding among all entries in the JAGDA Annual, regardless of category.

Preliminary nominations for the 27th award were made in November and December 2024 by 28 members of the JAGDA Annual Screening Committee present. Their selections were made from among the 1,777 works entered in the competition to be included in the 2025 edition of the JAGDA Annual: Graphic Design in Japan.

To begin, from among all works nominated for JAGDA Awards in their respective categories, the committee extracted 80 entries garnering the highest numbers of votes. Excluded at this time were 56 works by 15 designers who had previously received the award (Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Kazunari Hattori, Yoshiaki Irobe, Kaoru Kasai, Atsuki Kikuchi, Issay Kitagawa, Shin Matsunaga, Kazumasa Nagai, Tomohiro Okazaki, Taku Satoh, Katsuhiko Shibuya, Ryoji Tanaka, Ryosuke Uehara and Yoshie Watanabe). The committee members next voted for the work or series of works they felt deserving of the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award, with each member having a total of 5 votes. All eligible works were displayed anonymously, and committee members were barred from voting for their own works. This stage of the selection process resulted in a list of 16 multiple-vote receiving works.

The final award selection was conducted on December 24, 2024 by the 10 members of the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award Selection Committee. This year, 4 works which had been selected as JAGDA Award winners by the JAGDA Annual Screening Committee failed to be included among the 16 candidates for the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award, and — as was the case last year — a proposal to include these 4 works was accepted, bringing the total number of candidate works to 20. In compliance with the rule that limits 1 nominated work per designer or team of designers, candidates having multiple preliminary nominations were in principle nominated for the work selected by majority vote by the Selection Committee. However, this year there was a case in which multiple works on the identical theme had been entered separately, and after discussions the Selection Committee decided to count these together as 1 work. This reduced the number of final nominations to 17.

In the next phase, the 10 members of the Selection Committee voted on the 17 nominations, with each judge permitted to cast up to 3 votes. This resulted in 2 works receiving 6 votes, 2 receiving 4 votes, 1 receiving 3 votes, and 1 receiving 2 votes. The committee members then entered into discussions in which they each cited their opinions of each work. The nominations were at this point narrowed down to 4 works that had received the most votes: works by Noriaki Hayashi, Shogo Kishino, Hiroaki Nagai and Norito Shinmura. A final round of voting resulted in Hayashi’s work garnering a majority 5 votes, and accordingly the 27th Yusaku Kamekura Design Award was bestowed on Noriaki Hayashi.

The award-winning work is the latest in a series of student recruitment posters Hayashi has created annually for the past 20 years for Joshibi University of Art and Design. Through the years he has devised a variety of visuals using the motif of the “J” in Joshibi. Hayashi’s entry was highly acclaimed for its increasingly polished, consistently unique geometrical style; for its high level of achievement in a single poster, while employing elements built up over the years; for the brilliant connection achieved between the image of Joshibi University of Art and Design and Hayashi’s own forms; for its symbolic abstraction, a shining example of uniqueness while keeping to Joshibi’s core image; for its consistent strength of form and characterization, coupled with freshness year after year.