Uniwars

I released Uniwars on February 11, 2009, after several years of living in Japan. The design was influenced by the persistence of techno-industrial logos from the 1970s and 1980s that I often saw in my neighborhood—some professionally drawn, others with a more improvised look. While the style had disappeared elsewhere by the late 1980s, in Japan it remained visible into the 2000s, particularly in car badges. The old Namco logo, which I kept on a Pac-Man marquee in my studio, was a key reference.

Uniwars is a display family of eight weights with obliques. Its wide, extended shapes and orthogonal construction reflect the industrial and technological aesthetic I wanted to capture. The name comes from UniWar-S, a 1980 arcade shooter by Irem, chosen for its connection to retro gaming as well as its sound. From the start it was sold commercially and was never free.

On June 25, 2021, I updated the family with technical improvements: refining outlines, enhancing OpenType features, and adding alternate characters. The update didn’t change its overall appearance. Later, on November 22, 2024, version 1.2 addressed font menu sorting and web embedding issues by modernizing name tables and renaming Ultra-Light to Thin for consistency. Uniwars has not been used in notable projects, but it remains part of my catalog as a reflection of a specific industrial style that lingered in Japan longer than elsewhere.