Teddy Blanks, a neatly mustached 40-year-old man wearing ripped jeans and battered white sneakers, walked through Times Square one cold recent night to catch a screening of “Wicked” at an AMC multiplex. He hadn’t yet seen the film, and he was eager to see one particular shot: the movie’s opening title.
Settling into a theater seat, Mr. Blanks reflected on the typeface that appears at the movie’s start. It reads “Wicked: Part 1” and fills the screen in a gigantic folksy font during an aerial landscape shot of Oz. It was his handiwork.
“I partly based it on old chapter letterings from L. Frank Baum’s first ‘Oz’ book,” he said. “I wanted it to have a dose of nostalgia. Me and the director, Jon Chu, went through like 20 W variations until it had the perfect serifs and curves.”
As the magical world of Oz illuminated the audience’s faces, Mr. Blanks pointed at the screen when his title appeared. Then he boyishly tucked his feet up onto the seat, sipping a Coke and snacking on Reese’s Pieces, and watched with them.
His name may have flashed by in the end credits, but in the niche field of movie title design, Mr. Blanks is one of the most sought-after craftsmen of this cinematic art form.
In the same way that directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick relied on the ingenious title work of Saul Bass — known for his contributions to “Vertigo” and “The Man With the Golden Arm” — Mr. Blanks has become a secret weapon to a who’s who of directors. They include the likes of Greta Gerwig and Ben Stiller, A24 impresarios like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, and indie heavyweights like Alex Ross Perry and Lena Dunham, with whom he started collaborating back when she was filming her first shorts at Oberlin College.
Mr. Blanks’s typefaces, opening sequences, title cards, endcrawls and credits have probably appeared in something you’ve recently seen.
For Ms. Gerwig, he designed the titles for “Barbie” and developed an entire alphabet for its pink font that he named Barbie Swash. (He also worked on Ms. Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” and “Little Women.”) For Mr. Aster, he titled nouveau horror classics like “Hereditary” and “Midsommar.” For Mr. Stiller, he designed the Massimo Vignelli-inspired corporate font used in the opening of “Severance.”
“Teddy is an artist, which is the most important thing about my collaboration with him,” Ms. Gerwig said in an email. “He understands that we are trying to create an experience for people from beginning to end, that the film needs to be a good dancing partner and reward the audience for putting themselves in a place of vulnerability. If any part of it is careless, the audience will subconsciously stop trusting you. There is nothing that isn’t important in a frame. He sweats every detail.”
That night in Times Square, the AMC multiplex that Mr. Blanks visited served as a kind of art gallery for his latest works: There was a giant billboard for Mr. Eggers’s “Nosferatu,” featuring his gothic font, and a poster for “Babygirl,” A24’s steamy new thriller starring Nicole Kidman.
Studying the pink-lettered “Babygirl” poster, Mr. Blanks said, “This font is based on Times New Roman, but a kinky version.”
Of the “Nosferatu” billboard, he said, “The idea was to make it feel like it could have come from a lost silent German expressionist film.”
Mr. Eggers, in a phone interview, discussed his collaborative relationship with Mr. Blanks, who also designed the titles for his 19th-century maritime horror movie, “The Lighthouse.”
“Teddy is able to take my ideas further than I imagined them,” Mr. Eggers said. “His treatment for ‘Nosferatu’ brings us into the movie’s world. I wanted a gothic font that felt like something you hadn’t seen before, yet that seemed menacing and rooted in history. I’d tell him, ‘We need more of this on the N, or maybe the T is better like that.’”
“Movie titles get overlooked,” he added. “There’s not a lot of title designers aside from Saul Bass who are household names in film, but I think Teddy could be one of the all-time greats.”
Mr. Blanks works on his movie titles at CHIPS, the graphic design studio he co-founded in 2009, which operates out of a building on Bedford Avenue that sits beside the Williamsburg Bridge. He started it with two friends, Adam Squires and Dan Shields, back in the heyday of the neighborhood’s “Girls” era.
During a recent interview at the office, Mr. Blanks went deep on the unsung craft of movie title design. J and M trains rattled past a kitchen window, where an Emmy for his work on “Severance” sat on display. Omar, a 15-year-old Brussels Griffon, napped beside a shelf lined with books like “Typefounders of Chicago” and “The Elements of Typographic Style.”
“It’s an interpretive art,” Mr. Blanks said. “And making movie titles is as old as making movies. They were arguably most important at the start of the medium’s history, when there was no sound, because they really had to bring audiences into a film. I still try to make titles that feel like they belong to a movie.”
Some of his favorite title sequences, he said, were the openings for “American Psycho,” designed by Marlene McCarty, and Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” by the studio M & Co.
He also discussed the affliction of being an obsessive typography nerd. “It’s a bit of a disease,” he said. “I’m often not paying attention to my surroundings. I’m paying attention to the letters on signs around me. I also notice bad type. Life is simpler when you don’t notice poor design.”
As he clicked through Adobe files on his desktop computer, he explained that for “Lady Bird,” a prep school drama, he drew inspiration from Ms. Gerwig’s actual Catholic high school student handbooks. For Mr. Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” which stars Jason Schwartzman as an egomaniacal writer, he designed book jackets based on covers of Martin Amis and Philip Roth novels.
Eventually he found his old files for “Tiny Furniture,” the 2010 indie comedy about postgraduate millennialhood in New York City that put Lena Dunham on the map and was the start of Mr. Blanks’s title design career.
Its success became the stuff of indie cinema lore: Ms. Dunham made the movie on a shoestring budget and cast her friends and family in it, including Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke and her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons. Before long, HBO picked up “Girls” and Ms. Dunham was anointed a voice of her generation.
Mr. Blanks grew reflective as he watched the end credits. Among the names that scrolled past, credited as extras or in the “thanks” section, were those of the filmmaker Josh Safdie, the writer Durga Chew-Bose, the illustrator Joana Avillez and the entrepreneur Audrey Gelman, who went on to found the women’s co-working space the Wing.
“It was a moment in time,” Mr. Blanks said. “I still remember after Lena finished the film, we put up street fliers to get the word out.”
Mr. Blanks became friends with Ms. Dunham in his early 20s, just before moving to New York. Whereas she had grown up in a downtown milieu, he hailed from a less creative environment: He was raised in rural southern Virginia; his father worked for Philip Morris, and his mother became a legislative aide. When he studied graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University, he befriended Isabel Halley, a fellow student and the daughter of the artist Peter Halley. She eventually inducted him into her fold of city kids that included Ms. Dunham.
“I was at Oberlin, and we’d make plans to talk on the phone about what to watch, turning each other onto movies like Whit Stillman’s ‘Metropolitan,’” Ms. Dunham recalled in a phone interview. “We were coming into our own as artists together, figuring out what interested us. I’ve now been working with Teddy as long as I’ve been making movies.”
Ms. Dunham reminisced about the “Tiny Furniture” days.
“I was thinking recently about the time we all met,” she said. “We were all holding booms for each other. We were all each other’s P.A.s. There was a glee to it. Then the 2010s come around, and it becomes a snarkier, less cozy place.”
“Nothing can stay that way forever, young and pure,”
she added, “but my creative relationship with Teddy has.”
On a recent afternoon, seeking inspiration for a new project, Mr. Blanks visited the Cooper Union’s Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. Named after the legendary graphic designer, the subterranean library contains vast archives of design work. Mr. Blanks was starting on a horror flick directed by Zach Cregger and he needed ideas.
Sifting through drawers, he admiringly considered designs by Milton Glaser and Paul Rand. He studied newspaper layouts by Louis Silverstein, the influential art director of The New York Times. (Mr. Blanks married Molly Young, a book critic for The Times, in 2017.) But he was most engrossed by the typefaces of Mr. Lubalin.
“His most famous typeface is probably Avant Garde, and I actually ripped it off for Barbie’s end credits” Mr. Blanks said. “Because it was used on Barbie packaging in the 1980s.”
Something else caught his eye in the stacks: an obscure variant of a logo Mr. Lubalin designed for Mother & Child magazine in the 1960s. The logo’s ampersand cradled the word “Child” as if it were pregnant with a baby.
“It’s genius,” Mr. Blanks said. “He’s using type as a metaphor. He’s distilling an idea into a word. That’s what it’s about: You have to think about how the letters can represent something.”
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