The Anime Awards
Crunchyroll · Design Lead, 2022–2024
In the press: Yahoo News · Shorty Awards · Deadline
The Anime Awards is Crunchyroll's biggest annual fan event, where the community votes on and celebrates the best anime of the year across dozens of categories. Each year, the event has evolved and grown to scale along with the global anime industry and its increasingly diverse fanbase.
Setting the framework for the Anime Awards, 2023, 2024.
Ownership & Collaboration
The Anime Awards were owned entirely by the Marketing Technology organization. I worked closely with internal and external branding agencies, who handled the overall look and feel of the show to align with brand guidelines and expectations, and delivered designs to our dedicated MarTech engineers as well as third-party developers contracted specifically to build the voting system.
Scaling a global, publicly accessible voting system also meant checking in with security and compliance throughout, with all legal requirements vetted via in-house counsel. I collaborated frequently with our team's specialized content designer to keep voting copy brand-friendly and localized across all available languages.
My Impact
I directed the end-to-end product design as lead designer from 2022–2024, scaling participation from 18M votes in 2023, to 34M in 2024, to 73M in the latest year. In my second year as director, I designed an experience that garnered 34M+ votes across 200 countries and territories, including particularly engaged countries such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Mexico, and the United States.
Key Contributions
Ensuring compliance, and streamlining the overall user experience and voting flow. Consistent communication with delivery partners to reduce scaling back on UX and staying within set milestones.
Adapting the design to roll out across 3.5 phases of dynamic content: the pre-voting and judges' phase, the voting phase, the livestream of the event, and post-awards.
Defined a scalable framework to accommodate fresh content, updated branding, and new features each year, setting the foundation for kaizen with solid IA.
Phase 1: Pre-Voting & Judges
This phase had two sides. Judges were given their own private voting system to nominate which shows would move into each category for public voting. On the public-facing side, the experience needed to introduce visitors to the awards, inform them of timelines, hosts, and judges, and let them browse past categories and their winners.
Phase 2: Voting
This phase combined announcing categories and nominees, counting down to the week-long voting period, and ultimately opening the experience up for voting. By 2023, the Awards had grown large enough that Crunchyroll moved to hosting the live event in Japan, a statement largely made to have the Anime Awards recognized as a true, industry-standard award show. We wanted to inform users of when to tune in for the results and see some of their favourite community influencers take part in the live show.
Influencer MoistCr1tikal (Charlie) walking through the voting experience with his livestream audience, 2025.
Built for the Community, Live
The voting experience on the page was popularly streamed by anime influencers and fans. It's common for those in the community to live-stream their voting opinions and vote along with others. Because of that, the page had to be quick to load, easy to navigate, and the state of a user's votes had to be clear.
Evolving the Voting System
Year over year, I evolved the voting experience itself. I rethought how categories, nominees, and ballots were presented to make participating faster and more compelling. To make return voting easier over the week-long voting period, I developed a caching system in 2024 to ensure voters could resubmit their previous day's votes with just one click. This directly contributed to votes continually doubling, from 34M in 2024 to 73M in 2025.
The cached voting flow, letting returning voters resubmit their previous day's votes in one click.
The confirmation screen once a voter's ballots are counted for the day.
Phase 3: The Livestream
This phase was the show itself: a livestream event for fans and voters to tune in and watch as the winning results were announced by some of their favourite celebrities, influencers, and industry leaders. Once fans cast their votes during the 7 day period, the page would evolve once more to include a countdown timer, and direct link to the show livestream upon start.
The show starts in:
Influencer, Gigguk, and Award Show host, Tim Lyu, presenting an award during the livestream event 2026.
Influencer CDawgVA live reacting to the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2026 event.
The Anime Awards remains my strongest flagship project at Crunchyroll, with 73M unique votes in the latest year, up from 18M when I started.
Live from Japan in JST, the show still pulled 3M+ views across YouTube and the event page alone, plus countless more through streamers, with fans tuning in from every timezone.