I released Gendouki on July 6, 2006. The design was inspired by the idea of spacecraft access panels, so I introduced filament-like stencil lines that cut through the letterforms. The name comes from the Japanese word for “motor,” chosen to reflect the mechanical, engineered feel I was aiming for. It was always intended for display use—particularly techno backdrops or drop caps—rather than as a practical text face.

The typeface was a single style and has always been commercially licensed through standard distributors. On June 18, 2021, I issued an update to remove deprecated characters, replace reversed left quotation marks with proper quotes (keeping the old ones accessible through Unicode), and adjust the vertical metrics for browser compatibility. The outlines themselves were not altered.

Looking back, Gendouki can be seen as an example of hypermodernism in typeface design. The letterforms are recursive abstractions of both letters and stencil forms, pared down so far that they edge toward illegibility. That was deliberate: the goal was to test how much a form could be reduced while still functioning as a recognizable letter. I haven’t seen it taken up in notable projects, but it remains one of my more extreme experiments in abstraction.