Ono was born on June 24, 1957,[1] and raised in Chūō and Kokubunji in Tokyo, where he learned to paint tiles for Japanese bathhouses.
He attended the Nippon Designer Gakuin vocational school in Shibuya for his secondary education, where he received training under Tarō Okamoto, Yumeji Takehisa, and Shigeo Fukuda that continued his tile artwork skills into graphic arts.
[1] Ono was hired at Namco in 1979, and one of his first tasks was to help improve the logo and bezel art for Galaxian.
He was then transferred to Namco's new mobile game division established in 2000, which allowed him to return to creating pixel art.
As a freelance artist, he was hired by third-party studios to help develop pixel art for mobile and other types of games, including for those published through Bandai Namco, such as The Idolmaster and Tales of...