公益社団法人 日本グラフィックデザイナー協会 JAGDA

Selection Process of the 16th Yusaku Kamekura Design Award
The Yusaku Kamekura Design Award was established in 1999 to commemorate the achievements of Yusaku Kamekura, 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 award were made in December 2013 by the 28 members of the JAGDA Annual Screening Committee. Their selections were made from among the 2,443 works entered in the competition to be included in the 2014 edition of the JAGDA Annual: Graphic Design in Japan. To begin, the Committee extracted 44 entries that garnered the highest numbers of votes (24 or more: Because the borderline number of votes needed for inclusion differed between the various standard graphics categories and the Interactive Design/Videos categories owing to their different numbers of committee members, the standard graphics categories were used as the standard and scores were computer-adjusted accordingly) or works that, although they did not have scores satisfying the standard level, had been chosen to win a JAGDA Award in the various categories. In line with the selection rules, 10 works by six designers who had previously received the award (Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Kazunari Hattori, Kazumasa Nagai, Taku Satoh, Ryosuke Uehara) were eliminated, leaving a total of 34 works by 21 finalists.
The final selection was conducted on December 17, 2013 by the eleven members of the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award Selection Committee. In compliance with the rule that limits one nominated work per designer (or group), designers having multiple preliminary nominations were ultimately nominated for the work, or series of works on the same theme, selected by majority vote by the Selection Committee. This year, one nominated work was a collaboration by multiple designers including one who had previously won this award; this entry was retained among the nominations. Once the final 21 nominations were decided, the voting took place anonymously with each member of the Selection Committee having the right to cast up to three votes. The two works that received the most votes (seven or more) – by Kaoru Kasai and Atsuki Kikuchi – were designated as the finalists. A final vote was then taken, and Kaoru Kasai won with ten votes.
The award-winning work, “HIROSHIMA APPEALS,” is a poster from the ongoing series in which, once each year, a JAGDA member, working without financial compensation, designs a poster making a global appeal for peace on earth. Mr. Kasai’s work of 2013 is the sixteenth production to date. It was acclaimed by the Selection Committee for its brilliant return to the basics of graphic design and the vivid impression created by its simple but powerful black lines.

Selection Committee Members:
Kazumasa Nagai (chairman), Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Mitsuo Katsui, Shin Matsunaga, Masayoshi Nakajo, Koichi Sato, Taku Satoh, Kodue Hibino (costume artist)*, Takenobu Igarashi (sculptor/designer/president of Tama Art University)*, Kiyonori Muroga (editor-in-chief of “IDEA” magazine)*
*Special Committee Members

(Text by the Yusaku Kamekura Design Award Office)