Various title graphics for UPA

"Title design wasn’t Norman’s goal, but it turned out to be his fate. On vacation in California, he had lunch with a high school friend who was working at UPA. It happened that the studio was slammed with Mister Magoo and Dick Tracy shorts and needed help with lettering and title cards. Norman’s lack of experience (or the fact that he had no formal education in design, although he did attend art school in Indiana for three years) didn’t discourage UPA, and Norman wasn’t fazed by the long hours the studio demanded. During his three years at UPA, he handled all the studio’s title sequences, credits, and lettering, and occasionally contributed backgrounds. The playful hand-lettered type that appears in these titles, a staple of midcentury American advertising, was inspired by the expressive typographic language used in comics and newspaper cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. As design historian Steve Heller puts it (and any doodler can attest), “Once you let your hand do the work, quirky things are bound to happen.” Animation historian Amid Amidi commented further that this kind of chunky, cartoonish lettering was “treated then as an organic part of the entire composition [in print cartoons], whereas [title] designers isolated the funny type and gave it renewed prominence as a design element.” John Van Hamersveld, creator of the legendary poster for the surfing film The Endless Summer, cites this cartoonish lettering style as the source for much of surf graphics’ letterforms as well"—Louise Sandhaus, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936-1986