Hayate

I released Hayate on January 23, 2007, as a commercial display typeface. It was commissioned for a World War II Pacific air war video game, though the design itself had no direct connection to the period. I based the letterforms on the texture and resilience of sliced bamboo, giving them wide shoulders with thick strokes and narrow bases with thin strokes. The result was a small-cap design that carried a pseudo-Japanese influence, filtered through a mid-twentieth-century industrial style rather than through authentic historical models. The name came from “Hayate,” the code name for the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter aircraft during the war.

On July 19, 2010, I issued a revision to adjust the vertical metrics. Later, on June 18, 2021, I released a more substantial technical update that removed deprecated characters, eliminated redundant ligatures, refined outlines, and adjusted vertical metrics again for better cross-browser compatibility. Beyond those changes, the typeface itself has remained stable.

In 2025, I decided to reposition the marketing of Hayate. The original air war theme in the promotional graphics limited its perceived use and felt unnecessarily tied to military history. Since the design itself had no authentic WWII basis, I reframed it as an outdoor adventure typeface. his repositioning didn’t change the font itself, only the way it was presented. I haven’t seen it used in notable projects.