‘in the last 15 years, in typography the real advance
has been the use of type not as an adjunct to an
illustration or photo, but in its use as the image itself.’
said BJ back in 1963. the belief that words carry emotional
as well as intellectual connotations was central to his
work approach to advertising typography.

‘for some reason (probably clear to a psychiatrist)
four design projects in which I have recently been
involved have all had a strong emphasis on sex in
the form of the female anatomy.’
BJ’s best-known sex-related designs comprised
the ‘lifelons’ campaign, a series of advertisements for
nylon stockings, the ‘from russia with love’ and
‘goldfinger’ title sequences, and a poster for the
exhibition ‘obsession and fantasy’.
the first three pojecs were high-budget professional
commissions and the ‘obsession and fantasy’
exhibition poster was a low-budget ‘domestic’ creation.

details
B’Js sensitivity to the extraordinary qualities
of everyday materials explains the sexual content
of the lifelons ads.
the iterations of the advertisements for stockings were
shown in the display panels that line the escalators of the
london underground.
their sensual nature and their variation and repetition
were unlike anything else at the time.

sexy title sequences
naming all the talents involved, credits used to be
a bore, in many films they still are.

‘for the average audience, the credits tell them there
is only 3 minutes left to eat popcorn. I try to do more
than simply get rid of names that filmgoes are
interested in. it is just like a super book-jacket.’
- words by saul bass, who started the revolution and
was at that time (before BJ’s sexy titles) considered the
uncrowned king of the credit-title designers.

‘producers always leave the titles to the last minute,
they see what cash, if any, they’ve got left and then
decide on the cheapest way to tackle the job’
- BJ.

ulike his mentor (saul bass), a man who mapped his
sequences to the second, BJ had never worked
with live action before he made the titles.
he hated storyboards and scripts.
‘it is nice just to have an idea and play around with
the camera and the lights.’
-BJ

the two short pieces of cinema demonstrate a
a combination of conceptual neatness and visual
extravagance. nothing quite lives upo to the excellence
of robert brownjohn’s title sequences.

credits on a belly dancing girl
(007 - from russia with love, 1963)
BJ often told the tale of how he had sold this idea to
the film producers. in a darkened room, he turned on a
slide projector, lifted his shirt and danced in front of the
beam of light, allowing projected text to glance off his
already alcohol-extended belly.
‘it’ll be just like this’, he exclaimed, ‘except we’ll use a
pretty girl!’
at first the letterforms sweep her body in a fashion that
it is decorative but unreadable, a problem created by
the projector’s lack of focal depth. next up, the snake dancer
managed to move within a fixed distance of the light source.
type has never been teased so seductively and this were
the first titles ever to be given an OK by the cencor.
it was a huge popular success and the production of the
next movie followed swiftly.

credits and various film scenes on a female body
(007 - goldfinger, 1964)
BJ decided to base the sequence on the effect
in which the contours of a female model distort images
projected upon her - he used the (more-contoured-than-most)
girl as a three-dimensional film screen.
the names are set flat and still, while love episodes flash
around and over the starlet, which was covered in gold paint
from top to toe and wearing only a gold leather bikini.
BJ took particular care with details such as a golf ball
that disappears between her breasts and the scene in which
a pocket-sized james bond crawls over her tighs.
the sequence won various awards and BJ was widely
celebrated as the designer who could turn celluloid into
pure gold.

obsession and fantasy poster
the photograph, devoted to a woman’s naked breasts,
communicates an intimacy that crackles with erotic
vulnerability. ‘obsession’ is hand-written directly on her
skin - in a way that her nipples stand in for the ‘o’s.
details such as the small fold of flesh in the woman’s
armpit, one breast slightly larger than the other,
and the irregularities in the inked letters catch the eye
and do not let go. the model was brownjohn’s girlfriend.
this poster was emblematic of the ‘liberation’ enjoyed in
the swinging london in early 1960’s, where soft pornography
had associations with social radicalism.
(robert brownjohn had a cheerful enthusiasm for ‘playboy’
magazine.)
brownjohn wrote in his article ‘sex and typography’,
(pulished in the uk magazine ‘typographica’, in december
1964) that the idea sprang directly from his ‘disordered’
mind and he described the composition as an integration
of sex, typography and meaning. a perfect encapsulation
of an experience that can be described as ‘simultaneity’,
in other words seeing and reading, both at once.
the poster caused a certain frisson and has had an
afterlife as a cult piece of print.

see the goldfinger credit sequence, 1964
http://designarchives.aiga.org/entry.cfm/eid_988

robert brownjohn
was born in 1925 in new jersey, usa
he died in 1970 in london, uk.
see the biography
http://www.designmuseum.org/design/robert-brownjohn

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text extracts and images
were taken from the excellent book:

robert brownjohn
'sex and typography'
by emily king



ISBN 1-56898-550-9
princeton architectural press, new york,
published in october 2005
http://www.papress.com

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the human needs cycle has been conceived
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© designboom 2008