NIDEK Brand Guidelines: Gamagori’s Eye-Instrument Maker and Its Balloon Chart

An optics and electronics company on Mikawa Bay.

NIDEK was established on 7 July 1971 in Gamagori, a port town in Aichi Prefecture, and began operating on 8 August that year, the company says. Its founder and first president was Hideo Ozawa. The company says it started with only seven employees, and that the founder, who had studied in the United States, was struck by companies there that succeeded without being based in a large city; the aim was to make products “that rank among the best of the world” in Gamagori.

Japanese Wikipedia explains the name. The founding team wanted a company that would be known around the world, and while Ozawa had studied at the University of Rochester, a city home to Kodak and Xerox, those optical companies shaped the choice: NI for Nippon, DE for electronics and K for optics. The same source spells the Japanese name ニデック, which is also, since April 2023, the Japanese name of the unrelated Kyoto motor maker Nidec Corporation, formerly Nihon Densan.

The company’s founding statement, which it says has not changed since 1971, sets out three “dreams”: invisible to visible, visible to recognition, and eye instruments. Its early list of business fields included medical equipment, labour-saving instruments and calculators. In 2004, the company says, Hideo Ozawa received the Order of the Rising Sun; in 2008 he became chairman and Motoki Ozawa became president and chief executive, a post he still holds according to the company’s overview page. Japanese Wikipedia describes NIDEK as unlisted.

Lasers, refractometers and a balloon.

NIDEK entered ophthalmic devices in May 1972, when, it says, it began developing the XC-550A, the first xenon photocoagulator made in Japan. In 1978 it showed the AC-3500 argon laser photocoagulator at the International Congress of Ophthalmology, and in 1980 it launched the AR-2000, which it calls the first auto refractometer made in Japan. Japanese Wikipedia gives slightly different years for the first two, 1973 and 1977. Intraocular lenses followed in 1990, the EC-5000 excimer laser in 1992 and the RS-3000 OCT and SLO system in 2009, according to the company.

In the sources read for this guide, the piece of NIDEK design described in most detail is not a casing but a picture. Its auto refractometers and auto ref-keratometers show a patient a road running to the horizon with a red hot-air balloon above it. NIDEK’s press office told the ITmedia site Nlab in June 2017 that the road is a real photograph taken in Arizona and the balloon was added, an idea from the developers so that the eye would relax toward the distance. In December 2024 the Asahi Shimbun’s withnews reported that the company calls the image its “balloon chart,” that it has been used since 1990, and that for about ten years before that its machines, such as the AR-1100 of around 1984, showed an asterisk on a green ground. The road, the company told withnews, is in Monument Valley; the car on it was simply in the photograph; and the American scene reflects the founder’s hope of leading in the United States market.

The same report said NIDEK treats the chart as its copyrighted work and has found it used without permission on mugs, supplements and a band’s icon. Since 2014 the company has sponsored a competitive balloon pilot, both Nlab and withnews reported.

The company lists design prizes for its optician’s equipment: Red Dot awards for the LM-1800PD lensmeter in 2011, the AL-Scan optical biometer in 2012 and the TS-310 refraction system in 2018, and a Silmo d’Or for the ARK-1s in 2013.

Instruments, clinics and congresses.

Ophthalmic device makers sell to a narrow, expert audience: ophthalmologists, optometrists, opticians and hospital buyers. Their brochures and websites tend to follow a shared visual grammar. The instrument itself is usually the hero, photographed on a plain white or pale grey ground so that every knob, lens and joystick reads clearly, with the maker’s name small on the housing.

A second register places the same equipment in use. Slit lamps, fundus cameras and refraction units appear in clinic rooms, with a practitioner on one side of the chin rest and a patient on the other; surgical microscopes and laser systems are shown in operating theatres, with a surgeon at the console. Screens matter as much as hardware in this category, so many images show scans, maps or software views alongside the machine.

The third register is explanatory. Cross-section diagrams of the eye, showing the cornea, lens and retina, are used to explain what a device measures or treats, and many makers publish training material and webinars for clinicians. Because these are regulated medical products, some product pages note that a model is available only in certain markets.

Much of the category’s public life happens at congresses. Makers launch and demonstrate equipment on exhibition stands at meetings such as the ESCRS congress in Europe and the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, as well as at optical trade fairs, and their news pages often follow that calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made.

An eye, an N and the ocean.

NIDEK redrew its identity for its 50th anniversary. In April 2021, the company says, it created a corporate symbol and renewed its logo. It describes the symbol as keeping the image of an eye while its “elegant lines shaped like an N” express the company’s growth, and as gently wrapping the earth as well as the eye. The bright blue, it says, stands for the global market, the ocean, and for the founder’s wish to “row out from Gamagori to the wide oceans of the world.” Japanese Wikipedia also records the 2021 change and shows the earlier logo as used until 2020.

The company’s business domain, “Eye & Health Care,” dates from its 25th anniversary in 1996, and its internal creed is a set of three words ending in the same sound: kigai, chigai and sekai, which it glosses as strong will, differentiation and global outlook. Its English slogan, “Invisible to Visible,” comes from the founding statement.

The company lists five plants, all in Gamagori: Hiroishi, Hamacho, Tsurugahama, Higashihama and Osawa. Japanese Wikipedia says development and manufacturing are concentrated in the city and that its export ratio is above 60%. The company lists subsidiaries in the United States, France, Italy, Brazil, China, Singapore and Korea. Today the company describes three businesses: ophthalmology and optometry, lens edging for opticians, and coating.

For a design guide, NIDEK shows how a single test image can become a brand’s most familiar picture. Compare Topcon, another Japanese optical maker, and Zeiss. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a deep navy and a balloon red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NIDEK’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.