What does graphic design have to do to earn a coveted Yellow Pencil? Jury President and Partner at Pentagram Astrid Stravro discuss some of the entries that excited her the most with journalist Amah-Rose McKnight Abrams – and her picks range from a toilet paper totem pole to a Slayer record.

“Great design is a very simple idea that’s communicated effectively,” says Stavro. “It’s appropriate, it’s relevant, it’s innovative and it’s beautifully executed, it sounds like a formula and very simple but it’s so complicated to actually do that.”

Entries that she loved included The Play Edition by Garbett Design for Who Gives a Crap toilet paper, in which individual rolls were decorated with designs that could be combined into a tower, and Studio Sutherl& and Tom Sharp’s self-promotional project The Poetry of It All which saw them create plinths out of the sheets of work. Stavro also really liked Tom Sharp and Accept & Proceed’s All Watched Over for AWO – a beautifully executed data visualisation project.

What caught her eye were projects that shifted or changed perception of their subject matter such as the Yellow Pencil winner Printed by Parkinson’s by Innocean Worldwide Europe for Charité University Hospital. This saw a 3D printer ‘infected’ with Parkinson’s – using the ECG scans of patients' brains while using objects like a camera or a trowel – to educate non sufferers about life as someone with Parkinson’s disease. “In Yellow Pencils you do see things that challenge perception and perhaps when you push the Yellow into Black they are transformative one way or another in terms of what they do in society,” says Stavro.

Other favourites were the The Gun Violence History Book by FCB Chicago for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence and Dentsu West Japan’s Hair Calligraphy and Painting for NICCA Chemical.