Awarded Works

Poster: “Hiroshima Appeals 2020” by Yoshie Watanabe

General Graphics: “Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art” by Kazunari Hattori

Logotype: “Ishii Koumuten” by Ryo Honma

Book design: “A Garden of Camellias” by Kaoru Kasai

Package design: “Muji World Tag System” by Kenya Hara

Newspaper Advertising: “Mizu To Ikiru (Living with water)” by Kako Fujita

Ambient Design & Spatial Graphics: “POSIT” by Haruka Misawa

Interactive Design: “Tokyo Type Directors Club (TDC) Website” by Ryoji Tanaka

Video: “Study” by Tomohiro Okazaki

Integrated Design: “minä perhonen/minagawa akira TSUZUKU” by Kaoru Kasai

Publication

“Graphic Design in Japan 2021” (June 2021)

Award Ceremony

JAGDA General Assembly on 30 June 2021 in Tokyo

Exhibitions
Friday 16 July – Sunday 5 September 2021 | Tokyo Midtown Design Hub

Selection Process

The JAGDA Awards (initially known as the JAGDA Category Awards) were inaugurated in 2008 in line with JAGDA’s conviction that selecting and recording the outstanding graphic design works of the year is one of its most important activities. Again this year, a JAGDA Award was bestowed on one particularly outstanding work in each category from among the entries featured in the yearbook Graphic Design in Japan 2021.

As a general rule, 10 works garnering the highest number of votes in the initial round of voting are nominated for a JAGDA Award. However, the following categories are exceptions: Posters, 20 nominations (owing to the large number of entries); General Graphics, 15; CI, VI, Symbols, Logotypes & Typefaces, 15; and Interactive Design and Videos, 5 nominations each (due to the small number of entries).

In the first round, voting was carried out by the Selection Committee’s teams (9 or 10 members) designated for each category. Each member was allowed to cast up to 3 votes per category (with the option of casting fewer than 3). During this procedure, the names of the designers were concealed, and judges who themselves had an entry among nominated works were excluded from voting within the particular category. Ultimately, the 3 works in each category garnering the largest number of votes were designated as finalists.

A second round of voting took place on a different day with participation by the 28 members of the Selection Committee in attendance. Each judge was required to cast 1 vote per category. Again, the designers’ names were concealed, and when a judge’s own work was included among the finalists in a given category, he or she did not participate in that voting. In the end, the work attracting the largest number of votes in each category was designated the award winner. This year, however, in two categories multiple finalists tied for first place with identical numbers of votes: 4 works in the Posters category and 2 works in the Videos category. For these categories, another round of voting was conducted, limited to the works in question, and the JAGDA Award winners were decided.