Cinema typography has its own distinct tradition, separate from book design and advertising: the title card, the opening sequence, the end credit crawl. These are the moments when typography is not in service of content but is itself the spectacle — when the audience is asked to read before they are shown.

The history of film title design runs from the hand-lettered intertitles of silent cinema through the hand-painted studio title cards of Hollywood's Golden Age to the revolutionary work of Saul Bass, who beginning with Carmen Jones (1954) and reaching its peak with Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) invented the modern film title sequence as an art form. Bass argued that the title sequence was not pre-show — it was the beginning of the film. The audience's experience of the film started with the first title frame.

Contemporary film title design — studios such as Imaginary Forces (Stranger Things) and designers such as Kyle Cooper (Se7en, 1995, made at R/GA) — continues this tradition: the title sequence as a compressed argument about the film's tone, world, and visual grammar.

Saul Bass designed the title sequences for three Alfred Hitchcock films: Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho. For Vertigo (1958), animator John Whitney generated the spirals with a converted World War II anti-aircraft gun director, an analog mechanical computer — often cited as a pioneering use of computer-driven imagery in film. Source ↗

The Stranger Things title sequence was designed by the studio Imaginary Forces, inspired by 1980s Stephen King paperback covers that the show's creators sent to the studio; the producers wanted the lettering in ITC Benguiat, the typeface on many of those covers. Source ↗