Awarded Work
Package designs for brand of sweets (cl: Plaisir)
Award Winner
Yoshie Watanabe

Publication: “Graphic Design in Japan 2017”（June 2017）
Award Ceremony : JAGDA General Assembly 2017 on 23 June 2017 in Tokyo
Exhibitions:
Tuesday 4 April to Friday 20 May 2017 at Creation Gallery G8
Saturday 2 to Sunday 17 December 2017 at 2F Gallery, The Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art

Selection Process of the 19th 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 award were made in November and December 2016 by the 29 members of the JAGDA Annual Screening Committee. Their selections were made from among the 1,933 works entered in the competition to be included in the 2017 edition of the JAGDA Annual: Graphic Design in Japan. To begin, the Committee extracted 44 entries that garnered the highest numbers of votes (22.8 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.), and 4 works that received this year’s JAGDA Awards, albeit with scores below the cutoff line, were also included, bringing the total number to 48. In line with the selection rules, 14 works by 8 designers who had previously received the award (Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Kazunari Hattori, Kaoru Kasai, Masayoshi Nakajo, Taku Satoh, Katsuhiko Shibuya, Ryosuke Uehara) were eliminated, leaving a total of 34 works by 24 finalists.

The final selection was conducted on December 21, 2016 by the 11 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 24 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 2 works that received the most votes (5 or more) – by Norio Nakamura and Yoshie Watanabe – were designated as the finalists. A final vote was then taken, and Yoshie Watanabe won with 9 votes.

Yoshie Watanabe has long been engaged in design creation, with a focus on illustration, and during the judging sessions she received acclaim for how, in recent years, she has evolved from her former highly “personal” way of design expression to design that is symbolic of the times. The work for which she won the Yusaku Kamekura Award is her packaging for AUDREY, a brand of specialty shops offering sweets made with chocolate from all over the world, primarily items incorporating carefully selected strawberries from throughout Japan. The judging committee noted how Watanabe impressively used white space, especially with lettering, which they said evoked her worldview all the more.

Selection Committee Members
Kazumasa Nagai (chairman), Shou Akiyama (copywriter)*, Katsumi Asaba, Kenya Hara, Kaoru Kasai, Mitsuo Katsui, Shin Matsunaga, Kiyonori Muroga (editor-in-chief of “IDEA” magazine)*, Masayoshi Nakajo, Taku Satoh, Akira Uno (illustrator)*
*Special Committee Members

(Text by Yusaku Kamekura Design Award Office)