Iconic Title Designers: Maurice Binder

What Saul Bass was to America, Maurice Binder was to England. Binder was another brilliant and iconic designer, best known for his James Bond titles. He created the infamous diafragm with bullet shot followed by a prologue sequence, that we still identify with James Bond today. His other signature motif in the James Bond franchise is the use of the silhouettes of the female body in each of the title sequences. It seems that Binder went further than just designing movie titles. When you think about it, he designed the packaging and a movie brand image that still lives on today and that is very facinating for me.

However, Binder's design work was not just limited to James Bond. He concocted some brilliant designs for films such as "Charade" (1963), "Two for the Road" (1967) and "Arabesque" (1966), to name a few.

Binder's style was effective because it was always very conceptual and employed a lot of different graphic experimentations, such as the use of texture, film overlay etc. He was also great at using colour. His visual experiments are particularly fun to compare to the current Photoshop era. The design process today is mainly digital whereas before it was largely manual.

Like Saul Bass, he liked to use geometric shapes that came together into a very rhythmic motion sequence. Here is some of his body of work.

I couldn't find the "Two for the Road" sequence on YouTube but I managed to find it on facebook. Here is the link:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1097281038257&ref=mf