By-Enjoy's street-letter identity for GDC Award 25 wins One Show's design top prize

GDC Award 25 (Graphic Design in China), the biennial run by Shenzhen's Graphic Design Association, commissioned By-Enjoy to design the identity for its 2025 exhibition. The studio first asked whom design is for, and answered: not only professionals, but the public whose everyday streets are full of working graphic design.

Build the exhibition identity from the street: shop-sign lettering, torn, stuck, shifted and imperfect, so 'graphic design in China' is shown as it actually happens.

By-Enjoy built the system from cut-letter stickers — the lettering language of everyday shopfronts — photographed by team members during commutes and daily life. Letters were torn, stuck, shifted and layered by hand, keeping the real misalignment and mess, and every team member's touch became part of the work. The kit extended across posters and collaterals, with spot colour and UV gloss printing over photographic street texture on textured German paper.

The identity took One Show 2026's Gold Pencil plus the Best of Design & Branding Crystal Pencil — the first time a Chinese graphic design team had won the category's top award — and By-Enjoy was also named Design Firm of the Year at the same ceremony on 15 May 2026.

GDC Award 25 (Graphic Design in China) is the long-running biennial that asks what graphic design in China is and who it is for. When By-Enjoy, the Fuzhou studio of art director Yang Huale, took the commission for its 2025 exhibition identity, the team decided the answer should come from the street rather than the profession.

By-Enjoy's starting material was the cut-letter sticker, the lettering found on countless Chinese shopfronts, windows and walls — a form the studio argued constitutes 'graphic design in China' more truly than most award work. Team members photographed these signs on their commutes, then built the identity by tearing, sticking, cutting and shifting the letters by hand, deliberately preserving the crooked, uneven traces of real use. Every studio member took part in applying the type, so each person's force and rhythm became part of the design.

The result was a deliberately 'out-of-control' visual system that still had to work across every application: posters kept the photographic texture of street scenes on textured German paper, with spot colour and a UV gloss layer to reproduce the shiny surface of real cut-letter stickers. The studio's point of view was explicit — design shown for the people who live with it, not only for other designers.

At The One Show 2026 the work won a Gold Pencil and the Best of Design & Branding Crystal Pencil, the highest award in the show's design category, making By-Enjoy the first Chinese graphic design team to take it. The studio collected the prize on 15 May 2026 and was also named Design Firm of the Year.

It answered the exhibition's founding question with the medium itself: the identity literally is graphic design as China's streets produce it.

Real phone photos and hand-applied lettering made the work impossible to fake, so the rawness carried authenticity no polished system could match.

Deliberately imperfect craft created contrast with sterile digital precision, which is exactly what made it stop people's eyes.

A systemic core — one reusable lettering language — still allowed every poster and piece of collateral to be imperfect in its own way.

When a design community stages its own showcase, borrow the visual language of the people who actually use design daily — imperfection included — and the craft question answers itself on the street.

The GDC Award 25 identity became By-Enjoy's international breakthrough: at The One Show 2026 it took the Gold Pencil and the Best of Design & Branding Crystal Pencil — a first for a Chinese graphic design team — while the studio was named Design Firm of the Year. The win capped a record that already included earlier recognition from the ADC, Tokyo TDC and China's own design awards, and pushed the studio's 'design from the public's point of view' argument onto a global stage.