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 18th 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 2015 by the 29 members of the JAGDA Annual Screening Committee. Their selections were made from among the 2,201 works entered in the competition to be included in the 2016 edition of the JAGDA Annual: Graphic Design in Japan. To begin, the Committee extracted a total of 66 entries: winners of JAGDA Awards plus works that garnered the highest numbers of votes (22.7 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.). In line with the selection rules, 20 works by 9 designers who had previously received the award (Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Kazunari Hattori, Kaoru Kasai, Kazumasa Nagai, Masayoshi Nakajo, Taku Satoh, Katsuhiko Shibuya, Ryosuke Uehara) were eliminated, leaving a total of 46 works by 33 finalists.
The final selection was conducted on December 18, 2015 by 10 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. Once the final 33 nominations were decided, the voting took place anonymously with each member of the Selection Committee having the right to cast up to 3 votes. The 3 works that received the most votes (5 or more) – by Daigo Daikoku, Ken Miki and Yoshie Watanabe – were designated as the finalists. A final vote was then taken, and Ken Miki won with 5 votes.
The award-winning work, “APPLE+,” is a series of posters created to publicize Miki’s own solo exhibition at ginza graphic gallery (ggg). The exhibition introduced Miki’s design education method which, by using the everyday apple as his tool, aims to promote realization of the enjoyment and profundity of design. The judges gave high acclaim both to the bold design of the posters themselves and to Miki’s unique approach to design education behind the posters’ creation.

Selection Committee Members:
Mitsuo Katsui (chairman), Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Shoji Katagishi (director of Nanto Fukumitsu Art Museum)*, Motomi Kawakami (product designer)*, Shin Matsunaga, Kazumasa Nagai, Masayoshi Nakajo, Koichi Sato(*unable to attend), Taku Satoh, Nisuke Shimotani (illustrator)*,
*Special Committee Members