Eye Magazine

The Responder (2022)

For The Responder, a gritty police drama set on the rainy streets of Liverpool, Matt Willey’s team created a blurred, animated logotype for the title card and a wide, cinematic typeface for the credits. Willey drew a typeface that nodded to the language of the type used on the police cars and emphasises the wide format. ‘But I wasn’t sure it was interesting enough as the main title card,’ says Willey, who instead drew a typeface based on the vernacular white-painted signs on British roads – ‘SLOW’, ‘STOP’, etc. – with their foreshortening and extreme reverse contrast.

‘I wanted the idea of movement in there, so I showed Shira [Inbar] a storyboard of how the blurred type might work in animation. One of the producers mentioned getting rain in the sequence – there are a lot of shots of dark, wet streets in Liverpool. I’d always loved the way light gets refracted and caught up in the rain and the smears on a car windshield at night. Light gets turned into graphic dots – I thought this might be a nice way of capturing that feeling without being too literal or cheesy.’

Killing Eve, season 3 (2022)

Willey’s titles for the third series of the internationally successful Killing Eve (2018-22) shows his powerful main title logotype with dripping blood against a series of music choices that change from episode to episode. ‘I pitched the idea of doing the longer sequences in season 3, the droplets,’ he says. ‘Those were a collaboration with Pablo [Delcan], who I love working with. So much of that was in the editing of those droplets, which was all Pablo.’ Longtime Willey collaborator Giles Revell (see Eye 66) filmed the droplets. ‘Giles tried out endless combinations of different inks and different solutions.’

A Spy Among Friends (2022)

A rapid sequence of research materials, file cards and snapshots, ends with a flickering title card that shows the protagonists. A mood of tense obfuscation is mirrored by Dustin O’Halloran’s score.

‘I rather liked the challenge of trying to make it work in twelve seconds,’ says Willey.

The typeface is Microscopic by A2-Type. ‘Because of my friendship with Henrik [Kubel], I saw the typeface and baggsied it,’ he says. ‘That’s untypical though, a fortuitous bit of timing. The type for the other title sequences was all drawn by us from scratch.’

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

First published in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023

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