(Fan-made) Japanese Star Trek Logos

[Beamer]

So some of you guys may know me from that small "Trek in Japan" thread from a few months ago. I said on there that I'd been working on mock-ups of Japanese Star Trek logos. Ultimately what spurred me was an attempt to recreate a logo from a Japanese "cold open" for DS9.

Spoiler: DS9 Cold Open

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

After that, I just sorta jumped into doing the main series logos save for TOS, TAS, & DIS. I

Spoiler: TNG's Logo

This specific one was hard because it actually translates to "New Star Trek" with the word for new, shin, being a single kanji character word. Also, I probably shouldn't have added that slice through the text if I want any Japanese native to understand it, but it's kinda a key point in the design of the logo.

Spoiler: DS9 & Voyager Logos

Both of these were created with a fan-made font believe it or not. The Japanese posters for all the TOS movies actually used a Japanese version of the Galaxy font and a fan from Japan managed to recreate it. Only downside is that the font is kana only, so no kanji can be used even though plenty were used on the posters.

Spoiler: Ent Logo

To be honest, I should probably go back and change the dashes to ~'s since in Japanese, they indicate an elongated vowel. I also used a completely random Japanese font I had used on both this logo and TNG's logo, that seemed to look close enough Jeffries extended, but it actually turned out nice.

I would've recreated TOS' logo from the 60's, but because of the kanji involved (chinese-like symbols) and a font that I have no idea how to find, it's kinda impractical.

DIS is also hard because I have to make that font from scratch in Japanese and TAS is essentially just TOS' logo.

I also did a bunch of Star Trek Online Logos leading up to the Delta Rising Expansion. Had to be a little creative with the names so I didn't use a straight transliteration, but all in all I think it turned out good. I can provide translations if anyone's interested. I'm currently working on the rest of them, but finding high quality, transparent copies of the logos that I can edit are really hard to come by. Maybe someone can get me in touch with Cryptic's original illustrator files ;P

Spoiler: STO Logos

 

[Kaiser]

Awesome

 

[Markonian]

Looks like alien-of-the-week script to me. In any case, beautiful work.

 

[Beamer]

That would actually be an interesting project. Star Trek logos in random alien fonts :P
Glad you guys like them!

 

[Michael]

Fascinating project! I'm not quite certain I understand exactly what you are doing, though. Are you recreating the actual logos of the Star Trek shows on Japanese television? Or are you extrapolating how the logos might have looked in a style akin to the respective US originals?

As for the TOS logo, I can't read Japanese, but might this be a good starting point?

 

[Beamer]

I'm extrapolating. Aside from the TOS, movies with TOS characters, and the DS9 cold opening (who knows where that came from), the Japanese dubs have simply added subtitles and kept the english logos.

That TAS logo you found though is an oddity though. I haven't managed to determine if it's fan made or not since it would've come from a 70's dub of the show as opposed to the modern dubs that are simply subtitles and dubbed voice acting. The original dubs of the shows are no longer aired and very little of them remain. We're incredibly lucky a local station in Japan saved a few prints of the 60's TOS dub, or we would only have seen that logo on a handful of old model kits.

I did use this as a base for some of the logos for STO. Managed to make it by tracing the Kelvin movies' logos

Only problem here though, is that this is the katakana (their alphabet for foreign words) for Sutā torekku which is a straight transliteration of Star Trek. Like in our early dubbing days, Japan didn't use transliteration for titles of shows, they came up with new titles in their language. Part of this was because foreign words weren't widely accepted or adapted into their language until about the 1980's. As a result, their title for the Original Series is Uchū Daisakusen which is written in kanji, literally translated as "Cosmic Operation". Using this as a Japanese analog to our logo for TOS, would be inappropriate as a result.

I sure hope all of that makes sense...

 

[Beamer]

Might be a little off topic, but they actually made a Japanese logo for Discovery during the last round of press!

I'm going to see if I can't clean this up a bit and post it.

Edit: I also found a compilation of all the logos they use internationally on Netflix. Pretty cool to finally have a frame of reference to work off of for TNG's Japanese logo text. I'll probably update that too.

 

[Cyfa]

Nice to see your work here in the Fan Art forum - and the new logos you've found. I liked your logos and the various Japanese Trek-related things posted in the "Trek in Japan" thread.

 

[Beamer]

So I managed to recreate the Discovery Logo, although the texture and lighting might be slightly off since it's basically just a trace and cut out operation.

I have no idea why they made the subtitle silver as well, and in my opinion it doesn't look as good, so I made a version where it's the proper shade of gold.

I'll probably try updating the TNG Logo I found, next.