The Design Week Awards winners show the joy and humour of design

The winners and shortlisted projects in this year’s Design Week Awards show the breadth and scope of design – with projects across all media, large and small, and for all sorts of different clients.

This year’s Best of Show winner – AKQA’s Ugokidase Tokyo project for Nike Japan – perfectly encapsulates the scope and ambition of good design. The winner in the digital installations category, it takes in digital, physical, interactive and product design, provides a new spin on the Japanese national obsession of gaming, and positions its client as a forward-thinking and ambitious brand.

Like all Best of Show winners ought to be, you can’t find fault with it. As the judges said, ‘The perfect execution of every detail blew us away.’

The key aspects of this project – attention to detail and a belief in the transformative power of design – can be seen in all the other excellent category winners as well.

Witness the painstaking process Johnson Banks took to design the Great British Fashion Stamp Set for Royal Mail, working with photographer Sølve Sundsbø to shoot live models, before airbrushing them out to let the outfits speak for themselves.

Or Morag Myerscough’s stunning Movement Café for the Cathedral Group, turning a derelict and unloved site in Greenwich into a vibrant and colourful community space.

And (although I’m not really supposed to have favourites) I have to mention the one winner that has probably given me the most pleasure so far this year, the excellent Disappointments Diary by Asbury & Asbury and Hat-Trick Design.

A perfectly pitched, exquisitely detailed project that most importantly (in the words of the judges) is ‘funny as fuck’.

So congratulations to all this year’s Design Week Awards winners – evidence of design’s breadth, ambition, transformative power… and humour.