From Barbie logos to medieval manuscripts: step inside Teddy Blanks’ film title design process

But film titles can still present an opportunity for a filmmaker who cares about them – to help set the mood, create a memorable moment or inject a dash of humour through clever design gymnastics. “There are a lot of great films with bad titles, and they are still great films. And there are a lot of bad films that have really cool titles, and the titles don’t necessarily help the film get better. It’s important, at least to me, to not have any grand illusions.” For Teddy, titles are a very small part of the film, their role limited to creating a special moment that, for all practical purposes, might go unnoticed.

His own body of work, though, is hard to ignore. For the end credits of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, he cut up Mattel’s high-res packaging scans by hand and animated the elements; a VFX company, PowerHouse VFX, shot 360-degree photography of the actual dolls and sent him the animated doll elements to layer on top. For the film’s main logo, he had to revive a logotype that Mattel discontinued more than 30 years ago. “There were various versions that people had made online with auto-tracing in Illustrator, but they weren’t at the fidelity required for the film,” he says. “It had to be redrawn, first of all, from an original source. I found a Barbie magazine from the late-80s, so I ordered a few copies. It had really big, high-resolution versions of the logo that I could trace and turn into a well-drawn vector object. The first thing was just getting a digital version of the logo that we could use and then building that out into a full font.”

The process didn’t end at Barbie. Barbie had lots of friends too – Skipper, Ken, the works. All of them had custom logos in the same Barbie style from the mid-70s to the early 90s. These were pieces of custom lettering, not based on an actual typeface, because they changed slightly over the years – letters slightly thicker here, thinner there. He went on eBay and bought every Barbie-related doll he could find from those years. By doing so, he had about “half an alphabet to start with”, and he could use that to extrapolate and build an entire font based on that style.

While Barbie made him tweak, distort and play with practically every medium available to a graphic designer – from scanning secondhand magazines to working with animated dolls – other films have sprung up their own surprises concealed in the garb of minimalism. For the 2025 film Weapons, Teddy initially designed a slightly more ornamental logo which the director, Zach Cregger, felt was too overdesigned and made too much of a statement. For the new logo, he took what he thought was a simpler approach. The focus was on the bell that Amy Madigan’s character, Aunt Gladys, rings, which has a tiny little triangle on it. In the film, its iconography is never explained but the audience interprets it as part of her witchcraft. “So I put the triangle inside of the O in ‘Weapons’. There is nothing particularly special about [the font], except the O is a perfect circle, and inside it is this triangle. When I sent this to Zach, he called me almost immediately, and said, ‘How did you come up with this?’ The film is an allegory about alcoholism and dealing with addiction, and the triangle in the circle is, well, the logo for Alcoholics Anonymous. That was eerie because I had no idea about this connection at all.”

Weapons was a case study in the strange roads that design takes us on. His design decisions for the films of Robert Eggers, though, are far from being coincidental because he feels “almost bad taking credit” for his films. The final logo for Eggers’ upcoming Christmas horror release, Werwulf, was not that different from the initial design Eggers himself sketched on Photoshop. The uppercase W is a hard-edged take on a Lombardic Capital – a type of decorative uppercase letter used in inscriptions and medieval manuscripts – and the lowercase letterforms reflect rough, textured blackletter calligraphy. “He had already found a 14th Century manuscript whose lettering he liked,” says Teddy. “He had cut up the lettering and made the word ‘Werwulf’. He had a W, but he wasn’t so sure that the W was right. So – and this is funny, because it’s very similar to Wicked (2024) – we were looking at a bunch of different Ws and finally found one that felt right. Then I did it by hand, using Procreate, and gave it this old paper texture.”

The paper texture treatment was deceptively simple. The texture came from a scan of blank paper from a manuscript of the era, which Teddy used as a displacement map on the type: Filter > Distort > Displace in Photoshop, with a separate greyscale file as the map. Anything totally grey stayed put; anything darker or lighter shifted the image around. Used that way, he says, a displacement map can texturise almost anything. Even the horizontal line on top of the W of Werwulf was Eggers’ idea. “In the version you see in the poster and the trailer, the line is thinner than the version in the film,” he says. “The marketing team felt that it wasn’t as readable as a W if there was a thick line above it. We made the line much thinner, so that the bowls of the W were more readable.”

Teddy now understands, all too well, that expecting praise for the layered and nuanced processes behind film title design is a slippery slope. Expecting people to “get it” misses the point. Consider RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, adapted from the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead on the Dozier School for Boys, a segregated Florida reform school where decades of abuse went unpunished and dozens of deaths unrecorded. For the film, Teddy researched the school’s actual hand-painted signs, but they don’t appear in the film at all. “Nobody would be able to see those titles and think, oh, those are the hand-painted signs. It is not even an association that the audience could make. But there is that kind of unspoken emotional connection to something real that the story is connected to. It is maybe the most superstitious thing, but I believe that in some ways it affects your experience.”