The annually held Young Ones competition held by The One Club, an international non-profit organization that recognizes and promotes creative works, receives widespread attention from design students all over the world. Taiwan Tech Department of Design graduate student Tu Hao-Wei has won the Young Ones Portfolio this year. He is the first student in East Asia to receive a Young Ones Award.

The Young Ones competition encompasses various categories for its awards such as The Young Ones ADC, The Young Ones Portfolio, The Young Ones TDC, and much more. As a graduate student who majored in design for his entire college life, Tu Hao-Wei has been honored by The Young Ones ADC three times for his work. The Young Ones Portfolio that Tu Hao-Wei submitted 6 design projects for has one of the fiercest competitions among all the categories and western contenders tend to receive more recognition for the Young Ones Portfolio. There are 25 winners from 12 different institutes across the world and Tu Hao-Wei makes the second Asian student to receive a Young Ones Award after the Indian student from Mumbai who won a Young Ones Award in 2020.

Tu Hao-Wei expressed a sense of accomplishment for his positive results, which would be a boost to his design career.

The 6 projects Tu Hao-Wei submitted for his Young Ones Portfolio were class assignments, design projects, capstone projects, and exhibition designs among which all had received design awards from domestic and international design competitions including 4 German Red Dot Design Awards. Tu Hao-Wei has also exhibited works in Macau, Germany, Japan, Poland, and more nations.

Tu Hao-Wei’s capstone project named “Islanders’ Summer Homework'' was one of six projects in his Young Ones portfolio. As a thalassophile, Tu Hao-Wei collected sand from 22 different beaches across Taiwan for his sand painting postcards which include 12 variations of Taiwanese tourist attractions such as Turtle Island, Sanxiantai, and more. Tu Hao-Wei also designed a CIS for the Taipei Zoo by composing distinctive images of animals based on oralce bone scripts.

Also, Tu Hao-Wei and his advising professor Ken-Tsai Lee redesigned the D&AD pencil-shaped trophy for the exhibition hosted in Taiwan by Design & Art Direction Awards from the UK. With the aim of advertising Taiwan’s agricultural prowess, Tu Hao-Wei and Ken-Tsai Lee incorporated Taiwanese agricultural products such as onion, tomato, kiwi, and watermelon into the trophy design. Tu Hao-Wei remarked that their work was shared across many international media platforms and that they were even nominees in the D&AD awards when they submitted the trophy design to D&AD.

Tu Hao Wei received government aid from MOE Scholarship Program for Overseas Study in Arts and Design and will leave for Australia this July for a year. He hopes that he could integrate his future works with western and eastern art and continue advancing into the career of business design.