Up and Coming: Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design 2025
Dayeon Auh
Luis Adrian Borchardt
Nora Bördin, Anne Speltz,
Maria Calzolari, Hendrik Heinicke
July 17 - August 16, 2025
Vernissage⎢Thu. July 17, 18 - 21 hr
Opening Times ⎢Thu. + Fri. 11 – 18 hr / Sat. 11 – 15 hr
In cooperation with Stiftung Buchkunst
This year's winners of the »Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design« will be honored with an exhibition. The award-winning works by Dayeon Auh, Luis Adrian Borchardt, Nora Börding together with Anne Speltz, Maria Calzolari and Hendrik Heinicke, demonstrate how the book as a medium can extend beyond the printed word into space. The exhibition features photo documentary installations of portraits and landscape photography alongside text fragments, a two-part collage of colorful drawings, sculptures and contrasting black-and-white letter pages as well as a hybrid publication that moves between a physical book object and a digital tool. The exhibition demonstrates how design can serve as a medium for dialogue. Each of the three projects addresses social tensions in its own way. What they have in common is their courage to shift perspectives and their ambition not only to address the viewers, but also to invite them to think, play and question. In addition, this year's shortlist for the sponsorship award complements the exhibition.
Dayeon Auh
All the Games We Could Have Played
Luis Adrian Borchardt
Anti-Environments
Nora Börding, Anne Speltz
Maria Calzolari & Hendrik Heinicke
The forgotten stories of the 'Boat Driver'
Dayeon Auh, All the Games We Could Have Played
Here we have a book that seems to be bursting with colour, but over which a veil of grey has descended. We open it up and dive in.
Part 1: on the left-hand side are two envelope-like flaps containing a green booklet. Inside the booklet is a text that begins with the sentence “This is a slow, long letter for you”. Grey drawings are juxtaposed with lines from a dialogue about depression. The letter-writer’s perspective on depression is an external one, expressing a desire to help. There are grey clouds, grey pencil-drawn structures, cross-hatchings, visible crossings-out, smudges, grey landscapes. There’s a longing for connection and to be able to play together. There’s hope and light, but also uncertainty and a cage.
Part 2: on the right-hand side is an orange-hued book block. A counterweight to the aforementioned letter, it’s a gift and an invitation to its addressee: “Let’s go outside and play together”. There are games for two and for more than two plus games to play alone; they are games from a Korean childhood. A vibrant world thus unfolds. The illustrative style is highly distinctive, featuring abstract figures drawn with bold colour blocks that don’t try to hide the materials or method used. Text combines harmoniously with the mix of pictures and shapes, information blending with emotion. The Latin alphabet sits easily alongside occasional lines of Hangul, the Korean writing system. They become part of the game, just like the illustrator’s rubbings or the way the colour bleeds through – it all adds up to a coherent whole, one in which 28 lavishly illustrated game ideas combine with personal anecdotes and captivating visuals. The two parts are presented in a single case that not only serves to protect them, but also helps to unify the book’s two visually distinct elements. This is a heartfelt invitation to us all to rediscover the joy of play and cherish this form of human interaction.
Dayeon Auh (*1996) is a Korean artist and illustrator based in Leipzig. She studied for her BA in Illustration in Halle and finished her MA in Visuelle Kommunikation/ Illustration at Universität der Künste Berlin in 2025. Her works are deeply connected with diverse emotions. Her drawings are a form of wanting to share comfort and a desire to embrace diverse feelings, using books and colors in a world filled with sadness. Using analogue materials, she creates a visual language that reveals the imperfection and liveliness of everyday life, opening our eyes to the beauty of small pleasures.
Luis Adrian Borchardt, Anti-Environments
The book block is particularly voluminous and comes bound in grey cardstock and held together via double filing-strip fasteners. The front bears an outsized, three-line link to a Google Sheets document. The look is simple but effective, and our curiosity is piqued.
Inside, we find pages and pages of Arial, interspersed with a succession of experimental images. The numerous A4 sheets folded down to A5 make for an airy block, while the recurring table-like grid lends the pages a striking structure throughout. It’s a layout generated using non-design software with the aim of developing innovative new tools and exploring their potential. The authors worked with the program’s limitations, seeing them as a creative opportunity – a constructive framework.
Anti-Environments thus brings together various designer-developed tools; often, these are creative coding tools. They are complemented by explanatory notes on the software used, which was generally not developed for conventional design purposes and ranges from an audio recorder for generating visual output to traditional text editors and the spreadsheet program Google Sheets, with which the entire contents and layout were produced. Even the binding method points to this publication’s open, modular character; the collection can be easily expanded and, thanks to the A4 format, effortlessly printed out and reproduced, without the need for an intermediate platform. In other words, it offers direct web-to-print capability and easy accessibility for anyone interested in the project.
The overall result is a catalogue of experimental possibilities – one that encourages readers to explore new visual terrain and examine whether standard productivity tools can in fact do more. Design as an antidote to passive consumption.
Luis Adrian Borchardt (*2001) is a designer and artist. He studied communication design in Mainz and currently lives in Berlin. In his work, he explores experimental publication formats and digital processes within aesthetic and social contexts. He is particularly interested in the creative use of errors, technological limitations and in misappropriation, as well as the question of how technology shapes our patterns of interaction and behaviour and the resulting correlations. His work can be understood as a search for autonomous forms of expression in an increasingly automated and optimized world that is permeated by interfaces.
Nora Börding, Anne Speltz, Maria Calzolari & Hendrik Heinicke, The forgotten stories of the 'Boat Driver'
This large, heavy photobook contains seven stories that are themselves far from light reading. They are sensitively told, and presented via sensitively chosen visuals and materials.
On the matt-blue cover, the book title is confined to the bottom right-hand corner. Inside, single names – Alieu, Muhammed, Haruna, Issa, Hasan, Anifane and Zafer – appear one at a time in the top left-hand corner, and bit by bit, we find out more about the lives of each individual. The stories are accompanied by extremely sharp and impactful photographs – of the places that shaped their fates, the buildings in which life-changing decisions were taken and the documents on which so much depended, as well as of the refugees themselves. The layout gives the photographs space to breathe, maximising their effect. The columns are filled with bold type that underlines the weight of the subject matter but is still easy to read. The chosen materials are subtle yet effective.
Only the glossy, smaller-format inserts take a more uncomfortably challenging approach. They feature heavily enlarged, pixelated screenshots of decision-makers during the political debates that led to the boat drivers’ criminalisation. European legislation is thus called into question, the personal stories making its consequences shockingly clear. The inclusion of interspersed documents belonging to some of those affected makes the issue feel more personal and real.
That the photographers behind this project spent years researching and engaging with their subject is immediately obvious. In its materials and typesetting, this book does full justice to their work.
Nora Börding (*1994) and Anne Speltz (*1996) are documentary photographers from Germany and Luxembourg. They both studied photojournalism and documentary photography. Their work deals with sensitive social issues, creating respectful and empathetic portrayals through long-term collaboration with their protagonists. For them, photography is a dialogue that reveals different perspectives.
Maria Calzolari (*1997) and Hendrik Heinicke (*1996) are graphic designers who completed their studies in design and typography at international institutions such as the Haute école des arts du Rhin in Strasbourg and the HGB in Leipzig. Their work combines typographic, book art and research based approaches, with a strong focus on social, political and anthropological topics – particularly the relationship between design and political protest.
Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design
The competition Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design aims to detect inventive ideas on printed publications or hybrid book forms, and thus developments in the field of editorial design: An attempt to create visibility for impulses of tomorrow as well as quality concepts of today. This design competition for the up- and coming does not focus on technical perfection but on conception. Endowed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, awarded since 1989.
Stiftung Buchkunst
Stiftung Buchkunst awards »The Best German Book Design« of a year, offers a platform for rethinking the medium of the book with »Sponsorship Prize for Young Book Design«, and networks international book design competitions under the umbrella of »Best Book Design from all over the World«. Stiftung Buchkunst (German foundation for book design) has been a recognised foundation under civil law since 1966. It´s founded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, the German National Library, the City of Frankfurt/Main and the City of Leipzig.
