Yusaku Kamekura

In 1989 Kamekura founded the design magazine Creation. Bilingual in Japanese and English, Creation featured profiles and 20-page portfolios of international graphic designers, illustrators, and typographers selected by Kamekura. About seven designers were featured in each issue, and each issue was 168 pages in full color with no advertising. Creation ran for exactly twenty issues until 1993.

Yūsaku Kamekura was also a prolific author. One of his most notable works was an examination of what he considered the best logo designs, 1965's Trademarks and Symbols of the World, with a preface by Paul Rand. Kamekura's body of work is surveyed in his 1983 book The Works of Yusaku Kamekura.

Yūsaku Kamekura's best known work is the logo and poster series he designed for the 1964 Summer Olympics, reportedly created only a few hours before the design competition deadline. Kamekura eschewed the classical imagery traditionally associated with the Olympics in favor of a stark, modernist aesthetic, featuring the Olympic rings in simple gold below a red circle.

In 1951, Kamekura helped found the first graphic designers' group, the Japan Advertising Artists Club. He hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 but was still a trifle ashamed of the level of Japanese design. Convinced that it needed a boost and funding, Kamekura gathered the presidents of powerful corporations to sponsor a cooperative house agency: Nippon Design Center (NDC). The companies included were Asahi Beer, Toyota, Nomura Securities, Japan Railways, and Toshiba. After managing the house for two years, he left to pursue an independent career.

He was art director or editor for a series of magazines: Nippon (starting in 1937), Kaupapu (in 1939), and Commerce Japan (in 1949).

From 1935 to 1937, Kamekura studied at the Institute of New Architecture and Industrial Arts in Tokyo. The Institute was founded by Renshichiro Kawakita to bring the precepts of the Bauhaus design movement to Japan. In 1938, he began working for Yōnosuke Natori laying out Nippon, a multilingual cultural magazine. Natori's training in Germany influenced Kamakura, who became fascinated with the moderns and, eventually, Bauhaus. He was a fan of Cassandre, Saint-Exupéry, and Jean Cocteau. Early on, it was recognized that Kamekura, Akira Kurosawa, and Kenzō Tange made up a trio of great Japanese visual artists of the 20th century.

Yūsaku Kamekura (亀倉雄策, Kamekura Yūsaku; April 6, 1915 – May 11, 1997) was a Japanese graphic designer, the leading figure in post-World War II Japanese graphic design. His stature in the field led to the nickname "Boss".

Yūsaku Kamekura was born on April 6, 1915 in Yoshidamachi, Nishi-Kambara, Niigata Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Nippon University High School in 1933. He took his first paying assignment at 17, when he designed the Japanese edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Night Flight.