![]() ![]() ![]() Our design team – along with with anyone who has a smidge of interest in graphic design, art or illustration – are big fans of his work. We felt that this, and the work of this great designer should not go unmentioned. Today, Google has marked the birthday of Saul Bass with a fantastic doodle. His design ethos was simple and stylish, just like his work. ![]() Bass created strongly graphic posters and title sequences for several Preminger films, including The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955 Saint Joan, 1957 Bonjour Tristesse, 1958 and Anatomy of a Murder, 1959 while for director / producer Alfred Hitchcock he produced three title sequences and an advertising campaign (for Vertigo, 1958).“Design is just thinking made visual” – This famous quote from Saul Bass has been drummed into design students for years now. His big break in terms of film advertising and title sequence work came in 1954 when the independent film director and producer Otto Preminger offered him the chance to achieve a long-standing ambition, namely to design a unified identity campaign for a Hollywood film that banished “realistic” and sensationalist illustration and removed or minimised images of the film stars. In 1946 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked on trade ads for films before opening his own studio in 1952 so that he could take on a wider range of work outside the film industry. The ideal corporate symbol, he believed, “is the one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable,” pointing out that they are usually “metaphors of one kind or another … in a certain sense, thinking made visible.” This applies to the film posters featured here as well.īorn in the Bronx, New York City, he began his 60-year career as a graphic designer in Manhattan, where he attended evening classes in commercial art and advertising with two men who became his mentors: Howard Trafton at the Art Students League in the mid to late 1930s and Gyorgy Kepes at Brooklyn College in the early 1940s. His reputation in film sometimes overshadows his enormous and equally prolific work across a wide range of disciplines, from all manner of advertising and packaging, to logos and graphic identity programs for some of the leading corporations and institutions of the day, such as United Airlines, Quaker Oats, the Girl Scouts, Warner Brothers, and Minolta. His bold designs are matched by bold and expressive colour palettes, and the posters incorporate finely honed lettering and typography. Because he always sought to create a design relevant to the commission at hand, there is no definitive “Bass” aesthetic though his work shows a strong drive towards reductionism, distillation, and economy, features central to modernism, it also reveals a concern with fragmentation, layering, ambiguity, and metaphor, qualities evident in the 1950s but more associated with postmodernism. Today he is best known for his iconic film posters, and more than 50 title sequences for Hollywood films, each featuring an image or symbol that served as a metaphor for the film itself. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think – and rethink.” “We see the challenge in getting things down to something totally simple, and yet doing something with it, which provokes … If it’s simple simple, it’s boring. “We have a very reductive point of view when it comes to visual matters,” he commented. In the 1990s he stated, “I’ve always looked for the simple idea,” and went on to say that he and his wife, Elaine (who worked with him on film titles and short films from 1960), continued to do so. A voracious reader with a probing intellect, his endless curiosity, ingenuity, boundless enthusiasm for the task at hand, discipline, warmth, sense of humour, and sensitivity toward human emotions, all lay at the heart of his success.Īdmired for his ability to balance content and form, Bass believed that in any successful design, content was paramount. When art and design students asked him how they should prepare for future careers, he always told them to learn to draw. The ambidextrous Bass had a piercingly keen eye (Martin Scorsese once called it a jeweller’s eye), and an ability to freely sketch the myriad ideas that poured from his fertile mind. His highly evocative images, full of intense clarity and subtle ambiguities, are among the most compelling of the post-war years. One of the giants of 20th-century design and film-making, Saul Bass (1920 – 1996), was a visual communicator par excellence, who produced a diverse and powerful body of work. In this exclusive extract from new large-format book Saul Bass: 20 iconic film posters, Pat Kirkham and the designer’s daughter Jennifer Bass explore his lasting influence on film poster design. ![]()
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