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Esteemed graphic designer Joe Caroff, most well-known for creating the James Bond logo, has died, aged 103.
The news was confirmed by his sons Peter and Michael, who said the artist died in hospice care in Manhattan, New York, in a statement to the New York Times on Sunday (17 August). He was due to turn 104 the following day.
Caroff was the mastermind behind some of the film industry’s most recognisable posters and graphics. He designed posters for hundreds of movies including West Side Story, A Hard Day’s Night, Last Tango in Paris, Manhattan, and Cabaret.
But it was work on the 007 franchise that proved his most enduring.
Caroff was initially recruited to design a logo for the letterhead of a publicity release for the first film in the spy franchise, Dr No, in 1962. The movie, adapted from the thriller novels by Ian Fleming, follows the exploits of a British secret agent.
The designer was a notoriously underrated designer due to his lack of interest in self-promotion and was reportedly paid only $300 (£221) for the Bond logo featuring the spy’s gun, which has become synonymous with the series.
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“I knew that 007 meant license to kill; that, I think, at an unconscious level, was the reason I knew the gun had to be in the logo,” he said in By Design: The Joe Caroff Story, a 2022 documentary about his life.
The rate for a letterhead logo at the time was $300 (£221), and his wife has expressed his regret that her husband was not paid royalties for his work.
“My only regrets are that they never paid any royalties for any of these things that were done in those days,” Phyllis Caroff said in the documentary. “We would have been rich.”
But the designer saw it a different way: “It was like a little publicity piece for me,” he told James Bond in the Making in 2021.
As well as his work on movies, he is also credited with designing the book jacket for renowned American author Norman Mailer’s debut book The Naked and the Dead, in 1948.
Born in Roselle, New Jersey, Caroff earned an education at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He first realised he wanted to be a designer at the age of four, when a friend brought over a watercolour set and he used it to paint on the white suit he was wearing.
