How the Lexus Design Award helped launch Hideki Yoshimoto’s career

• Hideki Yoshimoto, winner of the first Lexus Design Award in 2013, gives a personal insight into how the competition helps new creatives develop their talents and achieve their ambitions
•  Finalists in the 2023 Lexus Design Award to be announced on 2 February

As the Lexus Design Award prepares to announce its 2023 finalists on 2 February, its first winner, Hideki Yoshimoto, explains how the award helped him build a successful international career, in a new short film giving insights into how the award helped him build a successful international career, and the unique opportunities it offers today’s young designers. The film is available to view here:

Yoshimoto won the award in 2013 with INAHO, a distinctive lighting installation inspired by golden rice paddy fields moving in the wind. He went on to establish Tangent, a London-based design and engineering studio, working on projects for major international business clients.

The annual Lexus Design Award aims to support and nurture young creators. Finalists are chosen for their original ideas contributing to a better tomorrow, while articulating the Lexus brand’s three core principles — Anticipate, Innovate, and Captivate. The 2022 Award attracted 1,726 entries submitted by creators from 57 countries.

Reflecting on his experience and the unique opportunities the award offers today’s young designers, Yoshimoto highlights the special value of being able to work with some of the world’s best-respected and most experienced designers as mentors. Each year, the finalists are personally supported by a team of mentors who help them craft their concept into a design prototype.

Yoshimoto said: “The mentoring session was great and unique. Like most of the finalists, I was a student at the time and had never seen or experienced how a professional designer thinks or works. The uniqueness of the Lexus Design Award is that it gives the winner the opportunity to start their career. I started Tangent as a business in 2016, but in fact was using the name from 2013, so it was also born when I won the award.

“My advice to the winners is to make use of the experience. You are on the top-level stage of the design industry with many people looking at your ideas. Make the most of this achievement and the opportunity Lexus has given you.”

Yoshimoto now has a lasting legacy in the Lexus Design Award, having been commissioned to design a new trophy for the competition in 2020.

ENDS