The 2011 Emmy nominations for "Outstanding Main Title Design" have just been announced and some familiar faces (and studios) are back with more outstanding work.

Sex. Power. Murder. Amen.

In The Borgias lush opening sequence, pious palms grip rosaries as beads of ichor seep through canvas bedaubed, inking avarice and lusty limbs groaning. Bon Boullogne's Triumph of Neptune, Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, Agnolo Bronzino's Exposure of Luxury: these moldering Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces murmur heavy the echo of desire. And when stillness overcomes the wild flow of exquisite stains, there gapes a single eye, staring back.

In a beautifully minimalist re-telling of the first World War drama Herbst, Clemens Wirth captures moments in the lives of the characters. A man covetously looks on an idyllic scene from afar, a woman waits alone at a window as the day crawls by, and bombs fall on men frozen in time as the highly saturated world moves around them, all helpless to a great and terrible machine acting upon them. Mixing crisp type with the sensuous ink drawing of the movie’s title and set to the brooding piano of Lukas Wagner, we bear witness to the characters’ call to arms, their tragedy, and the collateral damage borne from their delicate arcs.

With a planned release of Spring 2012 and filmed on location in Vienna and the Austrian Mountains, Herbst (German for “Autumn”) is a work from alumni and students of the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg.

"Winter is coming." —Lord Eddard Stark

A fiery astrolabe orbits high above a world not our own; its massive Cardanic structure sinuously coursing around a burning center, vividly recounting an unfamiliar history through a series of heraldic tableaus emblazoned upon it. An intricate map is brought into focus, as if viewed through some colossal looking glass by an unseen custodian. Cities and towns rise from the terrain, their mechanical growth driven by the gears of politics and the cogs of war.

From the spires of King's Landing and the godswood of Winterfell, to the frozen heights of The Wall and windy plains across the Narrow Sea, Elastic's thunderous cartographic flight through the Seven Kingdoms offers the uninitiated a sweeping education in all things Game of Thrones.

"Sometimes I'll be working on a piece, and I'll think, "No, this is bullshit." So I will literally rub bull excrement on the piece as a metaphor." - Kieran Draper

The wooden case is opened and inside, an array of tiny accoutrements. From it a tiny hat is removed while the credits sidle in, superimposed. And as a mouse figurine has her hair dyed vermilion, Paul McCartney's melancholic voice shepherds us through the opening titles for the delightfully downcast 2010 screwball comedy, Dinner for Schmucks.

The song, "The Fool on the Hill," kicks off a journey through a series of close-ups of itty-bitty objects being selected, constructed, and assembled. The minutiae gives way to several astonishing tableau vivants of miniatures—a bespectacled mouse and his redheaded mousette—engaging in the sweetest of romantic clichés, demonstrating an artistry so fine it leans toward obsession. The cherry on top is the whimsical and varied custom typography: the letters slink in and out of sight, vulnerable and idiosyncratic, wavering between wide and narrow, further lending the titles a sense of clumsy sensitivity.

Kyle Snarr for StruckAxiom:

“We wanted to create a naive type face that would feel done by Steve's character's hand without it being too precious or quirky. Likewise the animation had to tread lightly on the picture so as to support and not distract from the action on screen.”

Steve Seeley and Studio Dialog paint a gritty picture of heritage and struggle with their opening for Blackstone, Showcase Channel's gripping Aboriginal drama. In the show's title sequence, mounds of dusty earth blow across archive photos and snapshots of modern day tribe life and the children of First Nation branch out from their ancestors' shadows.

"Once again you are tuned in to the frequency of the erotic." - Bert Rodriguez

**Editorial Note: We have marked this post “Not Safe For Work” because elements of the reference art and production notes contain nudity.**

In the title sequence for Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a psychedelic melange of bullets, guns, and art deco ornaments materialize around the nude silhouette of the title character. As Elektra teases the audience with her own bawdy burlesque, she reprises her various adult film roles wearing next to nothing.

With our latest entry, Moises Arancibia of SMOG outlines how he and his Chilean supergroup used a bucket of paint and 3D software to make sure that Elektra lived up to her titillating reputation.