Shigefumi Hino

Shigefumi Hino (日野 重文 Hino Shigefumi, born 1963) is a Japanese graphics designer, game director and planner from Nintendo. He is the creator of Yoshi from the Yoshi franchise. Hino later served as the director of the Pikmin series, alongside Masamichi Abe.

Career
Shigefumi Hino joined Nintendo in 1989, where his first project was designing a sequel to Famicom Grand Prix: F1 Race, which was ultimately unreleased. His first released product was Super Mario World in 1990, where he created the game's pixel art, as well as the character Yoshi, based on a rough sketch by Takashi Tezuka. Afterwards, Hino had the idea for a game with Yoshi as the main character, which would become Yoshi's Island. He chose a hand-drawn visual style to differentiate it from Rare's Donkey Kong Country, a game that notably used pre-rendered 3D graphics.

Hino then co-directed Pikmin and Pikmin 2 with Masamichi Abe, as well as Pikmin 3 with Yuji Kando. He has additionally worked as a designer for Super Mario Maker and Super Mario Maker 2.