The Art of Title Design is a yearly session at PromaxBDA: The Conference where main title designers offer an inside look into some of their best, often award-winning, work.

TWINART’s Ellen and Lynda Kahn (also two-time Emmy Title Design winners themselves) moderate the session at this year’s event, with designers from Elastic, Imaginary Forces and yU+co.

Below are the main titles presented this year with insights from the creatives behind them.

Learn more about the strategy, creative process and design techniques they used during The Art of Title Design session:

Patrick Clair, Director, Elastic:

MTV Video Music Awards 2014

Clair, also the recipient of Stephen Price’s State of Design Award this week for Best Performance Period, shared his process for last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, possibly the cable network’s biggest event of the year.

The Emmy-winning director behind True Detective’s title sequence says this was “a different kind of story” for him, usually working with unscripted series, but the live event was a fun challenge.

The focus for the VMAs was the circle. These shapes became electronic forms, often turbulent and graphic shapes, and formed the rest of the piece.

Dan Gregoras, Director, Imaginary Forces:

WGN America’s Manhattan

Gregoras says the focus of this title sequence was about the “underlying darkness” of secrets in Los Alamos in the 1940s.

The project was difficult because the time period wasn’t one everyone was familiar with, but it was made even harder, he says, because no one on his team could write in the cursive they wanted, so he enlisted his mom to help.

This sequence was also the winner of SXSW’s Title Design Award this spring.

Grant Lau, Creative Director, Imaginary Forces:

Amazon Studios’ Bosch

The Emmy-winner created the title sequence for Bosch, one of Amazon’s first big crime series about one detective’s struggle with good/evil and issues of duality across himself and his city.

“We wanted to show Los Angeles differently,” he says, instead of seeing the same city already portrayed in several shows. Wanting to capture the cityscape, the freeways - everything - he and a helicopter toured the city to discover what aspects of the city one could miss close up.

Synderela Peng, Creative Director, Broadcast Design, FX Networks:

HBO’s Olive Kitteridge

Peng, formerly with yU+co., says the sequence “relied heavily on photography,” so the team at yU+co. created very delicate and detailed elements to photograph and stylize. This includes creating flower beds and close-ups in a conference room, re-creating entire spaces and items to the look was perfectly set to the miniseries.

She calls the project slow and purposeful “with a sprinkle of magic realism.”

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