The people who create the dominant symbols of our cultural life can often go unnoticed and unremarked. That was certainly the case with Joe Caroff, the American designer who retired in 2006 aged 85, who never signed any of his works, and who promptly fell into obscurity. But he lived on until one day short of his 104th birthday, and in the 2020s was “rediscovered” – a hugely significant cultural figure of the 20th century was hiding in plain sight.
It was Caroff who designed the James Bond logo, in which “007” is extended into the shape of a gun. He came up with that idea in 1962 and it’s one of the most enduring designs in cultural history. Would Bond have persisted to this day without such killer branding?
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He ran a small design shop, and according to a 2021 interview with Eye magazine, in its heyday, Caroff Associates would charge $5,000 for a rough design concept, and a further $5,000 for the finished article. Pricey for the time, but it didn’t put anyone off – he created over 300 film posters, including those for West Side Story, Cabaret and Manhattan.
Caroff also designed corporate logos, and even fonts. The lettering style that appears on the Last Tango in Paris poster was hand-drawn by Caroff himself and is still known as “Tango”.
So much of the cultural and social landscape is peppered with artful design work that it is often easy to look straight past it – the design and arrangement of these pages, for instance. And yet the works of designers such as Caroff are so important precisely because they work at an almost unconscious level.
And that, it seems, is the level at which Caroff worked. Recalling his most iconic creation in a 2021 interview, he recalled writing the figure “7” and immediately thinking: “that looks like the handle of a gun to me.”
“It was very spontaneous,” said Caroff. “No effort. It was an instant piece of creativity.”
