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Obituaries|Joe Caroff, Who Gave James Bond His Signature 007 Logo, Dies at 103
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/obituaries/joe-caroff-dead.html
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A quiet giant in graphic design, he created posters for hundreds of movies, including “West Side Story” and “Manhattan.” But his work was often unsigned.
Aug. 17, 2025, 4:11 p.m. ET
Joe Caroff, a prolific but overlooked graphic designer who created the 007 James Bond logo, the book jacket for Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” and posters for hundreds of movies including “West Side Story,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “Manhattan” and “Cabaret,” died on Sunday in Manhattan. He would have been 104 on Monday.
Mr. Caroff died in home hospice care, his sons, Peter and Michael Caroff, said.
His designs were familiar but his name was not. Mr. Caroff did not sign much of his work and largely avoided self-promotion. He was not included among 60-plus celebrated designers like Saul Bass, Leo Lionni and Paul Rand in the 2017 book “The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design,” cowritten by Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio.
“That he was unknown is shocking,” Mr. Heller, co-chairman emeritus of the Master of Fine Arts Design program at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, said in a recent interview.
Still, Mr. Caroff’s abundant output became widely recognizable for an interpretive style that could be bold, elegant, theatrical, whimsical, sensual and deceptively simple in promoting a book or movie and conveying its essence with a single image.
Image
For the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” (1962), Mr. Caroff was hired to create a logo for the letterhead of a publicity release. He began working with the idea that as a secret agent, the Bond character had a license to kill, but Mr. Caroff did not find Bond’s compact Walther PPK pistol to be visually appealing.
