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Kunio Okawara
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Best Designs
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Okawara designed all the mechas in the original Gundam TV serie, many mobile suits in subsequent series and some original robots for mobile suits encyclopaedia contributing with his excellent work to the success of many Gundam series. His design style is quite traditional, being far from Izubuchi smooth and rounded shapes and Katoki superdetailed style. Okawara was able to use different style registers in squared federation robots as well as rounded Zeon mobile suits, but always kept an eye to the realistic mechanics of the robots. In Gundam F-91 he quite successfully tried to revamp the old Gundam look adding more details and softer shapes.
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Hajime Katoki
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Best Designs
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Katoki is an excellent illustrator and mecha-designer. After his broad spectrum work in Gundam 0083 he designed a lot of Gundam mechas in "Dai 08 MS-Shotai" (08th MS Team) and reviewed Okawara designs for Gundam Wing Endless Waltz. A lot of modelkits based on his illustrations are available, the so called Ver.Ka of famous mobile suits and mobile armours. His design style is quite easy to spot, being based on an unusually high level of detail and on the justapposition of "blocks" over a substrate structure that's not so squared yet not so rounded (a good example of this tendency is the gorgeous Ex-S Gundam).
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Yutaka Izubuchi
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Best Designs
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Probably one of the first mecha-designer to abandon the subdivided side intakes of the Gundam head substituting them with plain jet-lookalike intakes. Izubuchi was the mecha designer of Patlabor and provided a fresh and original reinterpretation of many classical mobile suits in Gundam 0080. All his designs share an unusual elegance (for 20mts tall robots), with smooth lines and rounded shapes. His best works are probably the Kampfer from 0080 and RX-93 (N) Nu-Gundam from Char's Counterattack, with the revised version (RX-93-(N)-2 "Hi-Nu") appearing as an illustration for Tomino novelization.
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Shoji Kawamori
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Best Designs
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Being the designer of Macross and an engineer, Kawamori is really an expert in realistic aviation-related mecha design. His work on the RX-78 gp01, gp01Fb and gp02A was excellent, with a lot of details added to the original Gundam structure to make it credible and actually working, together with an eye for smooth junctions between the different parts that make up a mobile suit. Actually the amount of detail and the structure of the GP01 are probably better than that of Katoki's GP03 which is less homogeneous and more "traditional"...
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Kazumi Fujita
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Best Designs
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Fujita designed, together with Okawara, many of the Z-Gundam and GundamZZ mobile suits, while revising and cleaning up almost all the design works produced by other mecha-designers. He is extremely talented in producing original robots featuring a squared and complex structure, based on geometric shapes. He has the tendency to exaggerate and distort the weight balance of its robots, you can see it clearly in the Methuss, (the first mobile suit without a body) and in the Z-Gundam. If the anime version of MSZ-006 is quite traditional thanks to the hand of Okawara, the Kazumi Fujita version found in the modelkits market shows the author originality taken to its most bizarre consequences.
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Mamoru Nagano
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Best Designs
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Nagano, author of the space opera Five Star Stories and mecha-designer of L-Gaim, has a quite distinctive way to design that perfectly blends a realistic mechanical infrastructure and a fairy knight-lookalike external armour. His robots look as if they were made by justapposition of many thin pieces, kept together by an external structure (like in the Rick Dias) or an internal "skeleton" (like the "Type 100") and usually show an extremely high level of detail. His work in Z-Gundam was not as wide as Fujita's, but still he managed to leave his "signature" on the serie.
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Mika Akitaka
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Best Designs
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Akitaka first worked as a Gundam mecha designer in GundamZZ. He is the designer of the body of the MSZ-010, the head being Kobayashi work. After that he "cleand up" Izubuchi designs in Gundam 0080 and designed almost every Zeon mecha in Gundam 0083. His excellent design style showed at its best in the latter production, with the realization of the AGX-04 Gerbera Tetra and the outstanding AMX-002 (AMA-X2) Neue Ziel. The use of smooth rounded surfaces is a distinctive feature of Akitaka design works.
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Makoto Kobayashi
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Best Designs
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Worked in Z-Gundam and in Gundam-ZZ producing some excellent designs like the Bound Dog and Marasai. The head of the Gundam Double Zeta is one of his works, but not one of the best in my humble opinion. His excellency in providing an high level of detail is clear from his work both on mobile suits inner mechanics and space ships structures.
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