The ‘Bait’ title cards are an analog homage to spycraft, with their own hidden codes

The title cards for British actor Riz Ahmed’s new dramedy, Bait, are a colorful explosion of letters and numbers. If you look a little closer, each one reads like a code hidden in plain sight for you, the viewer, to unravel.

Bait is a six-episode series that debuted on Prime Video on March 25. It stars Ahmed (who also created and cowrote the show) as Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose leaked audition to play James Bond incites a media frenzy. Each episode tracks Shah’s exponential spiral as his private life is made public, forcing him to contend with his own identity, belonging, self-worth, and the cultural narratives mapped onto him as a British-Pakistani actor competing for a historically white role.

To create the show’s title cards, its creators tapped the London branch of the design firm Pentagram. Firm partners and brothers Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell used a system of color filters and letterforms to encode multiple different words and messages in each sequence. These practical effects create a visual language that mirrors the show’s core theme of an identity in flux—and cleverly invite the viewer to do some soul-searching of their own.

A system of secret messages

From the beginning of the brainstorming process, Luke and Jody’s team knew that they wanted to explore the idea of being “under the spotlight” as a visual proxy both for the classic James Bond opening sequence and Shah’s public spiral.

“This led us to explorations around spotlights vs searchlights, color scrollers and black light—different graphic methods at the boundary of spy thrillers, acting and theater—trying to find a space that could talk to the complexities of the shifting inner and outer perceptions of Shah’s identity,” says Alice Sherwin, a senior designer at Pentagram who worked on the project.

Ultimately, they landed on a system that combines color filters with with a series of what Sherwin describes as “secret message reveals.” The base of every title card is the same: a white background with a myriad of multicolored letterforms and numbers layered on top of each other. Then, in each episode, a different colorful filter—similar to the gel scrollers that are commonly slipped in front of theater lights to quickly change their hues—is applied over that base, bringing certain messages to the forefront and relegating others to the background. 

As these filters are shifted into place, new layers of meaning to the show’s title, Bait, are revealed. In one instance, the Urdu symbol for “bait” appears directly above the word loyalty, which is how the word is defined in that language; in another, the word troll appears beside “provo” as a subtle reference to the British slang interpretation of “bait” as a provocation; and in a third, disparate letters come together to spell “of a trap,” i.e., bait as an incentive. 

These hidden messages serve as a clever way of hinting at the series’ connection to iconic spy media, alongside the monospace font, ABC Rom Mono, which was chosen for its blocky, code-like setting. Below the surface, they also work to subtly foreshadow Shah’s struggles with the definition of “bait” in the context of his career and identity. The repeated hiding and revealing of information reflects Shah grappling with both being in the spotlight and trying to control it at the same time.

“All of the show’s titles exist in a single typographic layout, and information is concealed and revealed each episode through the filters, reflecting how all identities the protagonist has as a British-Pakistani man, and the versions of these that others project onto him, exist at once,” Sherwin says.

The real genius of Pentagram’s treatment is how it not only visually captures Shah’s struggles to untangle his identity, but also invites the viewer into the process. By pausing on the title cards, hunting for double-meanings, and finding new details, the viewer themselves becomes a part of the decoding.

It’s a meta concept for a show that embraces nuance and complexity rather than attempting to deliver clear conclusions.

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