Joe Caroff obituary: Graphic designer behind 007 James Bond logo

Times

19 hours ago

Sitting in his New York studio in 1962, Joe Caroff was hit with a moment of inspiration. He had been paid $300 to come up with a letterhead logo for a low-budget, mildly anticipated spy film called Dr No. Unimpressed by the hero's stocky Walther PPK, he instead sketched a daintier weapon and the James Bond insignia was born.
'That was a totally spontaneous piece of creativity. I simply sat at my desk and wrote 007 on a piece of paper,' he remembered. 'The minute I wrote the seven, especially on the downstroke, I just somehow immediately saw that as the handle of a gun. Adding the barrel and the trigger was virtually nothing.'
More than half a century later, the symbol remains synonymous with Britain's most thrilling cultural export, but Caroff, who sold the design without retaining any rights, never saw the dividends. He was not credited in the film and, until recently, little known. Though the designer was unshaken by his near-miss with fame and his company thrived, his wife was stirred by his uncredited success: 'We would have been rich,' she lamented.
Joseph Caroff was born in Linden, New Jersey, in 1921 to Fanny (née Sack) and Julius Caroff, Jewish immigrants from Babruysk, modern-day Belarus. His father was a painter and his mother took care of Joe and his five siblings. Aged four, he began to show creative flair when he used a friend's watercolour set to redecorate his white summer suit.
Caroff attended the Newark Public School of Fine and Industrial Arts and later majored in advertising design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Caroff also became the right-hand man of Jean Carlu, a French designer who had lost an arm in a Parisian trolley accident, for his Second World War propaganda posters.
He graduated in 1942 but, five days after marrying his girlfriend Phyllis (née Friedman), he was drafted into the army air force and sent to RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. There Caroff painted pin-up girls onto B-17 bombers and helped drop the very posters he had designed onto occupied Europe.
After a brief stint in north Africa he was honorably discharged and joined a New York design firm but soon left to freelance book jackets. His break came in 1948 when Norman Mailer recruited him to design his debut novel The Naked and the Dead. The black and red cover was the only piece Caroff signed and it landed him the Bond contract.
Caroff ended up working on more than 300 film campaigns. His first was West Side Story (1961): he used the rugged title font as a terrace wall and drew Maria and Tony dancing on the fire escape. His lack of self-promotion, however, meant Saul Bass was often mistakenly credited for the piece.
He founded the agency J Caroff Associates in Manhattan in 1965. His most notable pieces of that period included the posters for Cabaret (1972), Rollerball (1975) and Death of a Salesman (1985). He dabbled especially in creative fonts — The Great Train Robbery (1978) was spelt out in the shape of the locomotive, the letters of Manhattan (1979) depicted the New York skyline and Last Tango in Paris (1972) had an entire typeface designed in homage.
Some designs he regretted. At the urging of a producer, the poster for the erotic thriller Tattoo (1981) featured a naked woman tied at the ankles. The film did not merit much critical acclaim — The Times lambasted it for 'creeping morbidity' — and outraged protesters ripped his art from billboards.
Different film-makers wanted different things. Woody Allen would walk in, look at six options, point at one and leave without saying a word, Caroff said. One time his team mocked up a joke flyer that declared: 'Prunes, the most moving picture since Bananas'. Allen did not even smirk.
Martin Scorsese, on the other hand, was full of ideas for the promotion of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). 'I listened to him and listened to him, and he didn't have the visual gift of seeing it differently,' Caroff said. He instead used a thicket of thorns silhouetted on a blood-red background. Scorsese loved it so much he incorporated it into the film's opening.
During his long career, he also worked on the logo for Olympic coverage by ABC News, the poster for the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964) and the Orion Pictures title sequence. He only retired in his eighties. Caroff always viewed himself as a creative mercenary and he never kept his designs although decades on, many of his originals would have been sold for many times the commission fee.
Caroff had two sons, Peter and Michael. He spent the twilight of his career on fine art and philanthropy. A portion of his art sales went to a children's medical research hospital and he set up a scholarship for social care students at Hunter College, where his wife was an emeritus professor. She died in February, aged 100, after 81 years of marriage.
Only at the end of his career did his impact on mid-century art begin to be recognised. On his 100th birthday he was sent a 007-engraved Omega watch by the Bond producers and in 2022 the documentary By Design: The Joe Caroff Story was televised. Doubtless he would have been recognised far sooner had he imitated his spy muse and signed his work: 'The name's Caroff. Joe Caroff'.
Joe Caroff, designer and artist, was born on August 18, 1921. He died on August 17, 2025, aged 103