Saul Bass

SAUL BASS

THINKING MADE

VISUAL

Not many times do you hear about great design and not have Saul Bass’s name come about. Known for his numerous corporate identity projects and movie title sequence designs, Bass was what I would like to call a “master” of design. Bass was born in 1920 in the Bronx of New York. He began taking classes at the Art Students League in Manhattan in 1936 before accepting his first graphic design position for a small design firm about a year later. (Maggs) Moving forward, he found himself working for the Blaine Thompson Company which was a fairly well-known advertising agency in New York. It was here that Bass encountered Gyorgy Kepes, a Bauhaus luminary. Kepes was a professor at Brooklyn College and Bass, being the major fan of Kepes that he was, enrolled for one of his courses immediately. Bass learned an insane amount about the Modern Movement and constructivism in graphic design and that is what initially sparked his interest in film and film design. Bass was offered a position for Buchanen and Company, a big corporation that ran accounts for clients such as Trans World Airlines and Paramount Pictures, in 1946. Bass quickly stepped up to the plate and snatched this opportunity to up and move to Los Angeles, California and that’s really where his individual career took off. (Bos)

e n with th The Ma , Arm Golden . ss,1955 a B l u a S

“DESIGN IS THINKING MADE VISUAL.”

03

IN CALIFORNIA, BASS WAS DOING PRINT WORK FOR FILM ADS and was able to do a collaboration with Otto Preminger to design a poster for his film that came out in 1954 called Carmen Jones. Otto was impressed with the work Bass had created that he asked him to produce the title sequence too. This was the point in Bass’s life when he realized that the opening and closing credits were so much more than just a quick introduction or ending to a work of film art. By 1952, Bass decided that it was time for

04

Left. Saint Joan movie poster. Saul Bass,1957.

Right. West Side Story poster. Saul Bass,1962.

him to open up his own company. In 1956, he brought on a woman named Elaine Makatura as a design assistant.

They worked well together and fell in love while doing so. They married in 1961 and remained design partners in crime for the rest of their lives. (Brown) Their first experience in short film making was with promotional films for pavilions at the 1964 World’s Fair, From Here to There for United Airlines and The Searching Eye for Eastman Kodak.

(Bos) Bass was inspired by Paul Rand, but took it upon himself to see things in a different light. Rand’s use of shape and asymmetrical balance in the 1940’s was a different direction than what Bass went for. He reduced his designs to a single dominant image rather than using complex contrasts of shape, color, and texture in his compositions. He was taking things he had been taught and incorporating them in designs that were his own style.

0405

The Man With the Golden Arm. Saul Bass,1955.

06

SAUL BASS IS EXTREMELY WELL KNOWN FOR HIS award-winning film title sequences.

He was the first to throw aside the idea that graphic design and film design are closely related disciplines. If you are talking about medium, time, concept, technique, and technical aspects, the two are not closely bonded.

Graphic design is normally a smaller group coming together to create, whereas film directing and producing come from the efforts of large groups of people, equipment, variables, and ideas. The thing is, Bass has completely mastered each and was comfortable in doing them. The language of graphic design was transformed by the integration of type and image with the time-based element of motion to create the new field known as motion graphics. This was a way of extending the art of storytelling with techniques that weren’t the norm of

what had been seen before. Motion pictures had long used traditional portraits of actors and actresses in promoting films, and very below average typography for the titles of the films. Bass began his work in the film industry with Otto Preminger. (Doulas) After the first project they worked on together, Preminger had Bass creating unified graphic materials for all of his films, including logos, theatre posters, advertising, and animated film titles.

One of Bass’s first comprehensive design program projects that unified print and media graphics for a film was in 1955 for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm. This was a film about drug addiction and Bass used a symbol of a thick pictographic arm thrusting downward into a rectangle composed of flat, cutout shapes and

bracketed with the title of the film. The titles for this film worked in unison and were equally as innovative. Accompanied by jazz music, a single white bar is pushing downwards onto the screen, followed by three more; when all four reach the center of the screen, subtle typography appears, featuring the performers in the show. All of the elements seen, except for one bar that is retained for continuity, fade. Then, four bars slide in from the top, bottom, and sides to frame the film-title typography, which all of a sudden appears.

The sequence of bars and typography keeps occurring in perfect synchronization to the sound of loud and obnoxious jazz orchestration in the background through the credits. Lastly, the bars come flying in on the screen to form the pictographic arm that Saul had created . (Douglas)

0407

“I WANT TO MAKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS.

Saul Bass,1957.

Photo by Harrie Verstappen.

EVEN IF NOBODY CARES, AS OPPOSED TO UGLY THINGS THAT’S MY INTENT.” SAUL BASS

0409

Vertigo movie poster. Saul Bass,1958.

10

MASTER OF THE FILM TITLE

From this eccentric beginning of film design, Saul became the acknowledged master of the film title.

He processed an organic form of putting objects and symbols together to show forms that appear, disintegrate, reform, and transform in to the time and space world of design. The way Bass went about this film title creation was seen being carried over to the area of printed graphics. A Bass motion picture design was seen in large films besides The Man with the Golden Arm, like Vertigo, North by North West, Psycho, and West Side Story. Though this was not one of his most famous works, his sequence for Grand Prix in 1966 is interesting in the way it uses multiple close shots of race cars that are closely edited in order to build the start of the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, leading effortlessly into the opening of this movie. Bass directed all of the footage used for this sequence and the director of this movie, John Frankenheimer, was so blown away

by Bass’s talent that he asked Bass to act as a visual consultant for the film.

Bass ended up shooting footage for all but one of them that was shown.

Bass motion picture programs can be seen in the 1960’s graphics for Exodus. He created a pictograph of arms reaching upward and struggling for a rifle, showing the violence and strife connection with the birth of the nation of Israel. This mark was seen in many places including newspaper, magazines, trade advertisement posters, film titles, and even stationary, shipping labels, and other printed materials. Each of the separate items was approached in a different way and as a communications problem. The simplicity and direct way of going about projects enables Bass’s viewers to interpret the design content immediately. Another interesting fact about some interesting work that Bass has done is that he took part in helping in the storyboarding and shooting of the famous shower scene in Psycho for Hitchcock in 1960. He also won an Oscar and a Moscow Film Festival gold award for his short documentary in 1968 called Why Man Creates.

0411

Corporate identity was the other face of design that Saul Bass is largely known for. While World War II left most industrial countries devastated, the manufacturing capacity of the United States escaped undamaged. (Bos) An era of industrial expansion began, with large corporations playing an important role in developing and marketing products and services. Saul Bass embraced corporate visual identification as a major design activity. His mastery of elemental form can be seen in the iconic and widely known and seen trademarks produced by his firm Saul Bass & Associates, later named Saul Bass/ Herb Yeager & Associates. Bass believed a trademark must be readily understood yet must possess elements of metaphor and ambiguity that continues to attract the viewer time and time again.

He also describes his title sequencing as seeing familiar parts of the world in an unfamiliar way. In better words, “making the ordinary, extraordinary.� (Douglas) Advise & Consent movie poster.

Saul Bass,1962.

12

Bell Sysytem logo.

Saul Bass, late 1960’s.

Many of Saul Bass’s trademarks, including the mark for Minolta, became cultural icons. Within two years after Bass redesigned the Bell Telephone System trademark, public recognition of the symbol rose from 71 percent to more than 90 percent. Bass designed a new mark to reposition the firm as a “global communications company” rather than “the national telephone system” with information bits around the globe after the AT&T long-distance telephone network

14

was split from the local Bell system telephone companies in 1984.

(Brown) This concept was shown by the creation of computer graphics animation the identification tag for AT&T television commercials. Bass designed some of the most famous corporate logos. Besides the original bell for AT&T, he created the jet stream logo for Continental Airlines in 1968 and also the United Airlines logo of the tulip in 1974. The United Airlines logo is a stylized 68 degree

tilted “U” that was brought about in 1974 and then later discarded when United and Continental Airlines merged together in 2011. (Douglas) The new version of the United Airlines logo incorporates the use of a globe which was a crucial part of the United logo before the joining of companies. The use of blue in this mark is to show approachability, excellence, and grace of the corporation, whereas the white represents nobility, elegance, and purity.

TYPEFACE IS WHAT WON THE COMPANY OVER.

16

The infamous Kleenex logo was created in 1980 and its typeface is what won over the company. It’s elegance and movement was perfect for what this brand was trying to communicate to customers to take into consideration when buying the product. Since then it has changed only just a bit. The text is now on an upper arc bend. This is an iconic logo that everyone could spot and point out. One of his famous logos came about in October of 1978. It was the Girl Scouts logo that was first

presented in Denver. (Bos) This design has become famous for its use of white space. It combines the trefoil symbol, which had been used by the organization for a long time with the silhouettes of the three girls. This logo has since been updated a bit, but everyone knows better than to mess with it too much. Subtle changes to the girls’ profile have been made to look younger, but other than that not much has changed since this iconic trademark was presented over 40 years ago.

Top. Original Kleenex logo.

Bottom. Updated Kleenex logo.

0417

Towards the end of Bass’s career, he was rediscovered by James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese who were both huge fans of his. For Scorsese, Saul Bass created title sequences for Goodfellas that came out in 1990, Cape Fear that came in 1991, The Age of Innocence in 1993, and Casino in 1996, which was his last title sequence. (Brown) His later work with Martin Scorsese saw him move away from the optical techniques that he had typically used and move into the use of computerized effects. Bass’s title sequences featured different and innovative methods of design and production. He was awarded the AIGA Medal in 1981 to add to his long and quite extraordinary list of honors and achievements. It may be cliché, but Saul Bass really has done it all. Films.

Packaging. Products. Corporate Identification. Graphics. His work literally surrounds us. Bass states that “Design is thinking made visual.”. Pick up the phone and try not to think of Bass’s

infamous Bell System symbol. Ride in an airplane- United, Continental, Frontier: Saul Bass. Go see a movie- Psycho, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm: Saul Bass. Go shopping at your local supermarket or do some cooking in the kitchen- Wesson, Quaker, Alcoa, Dixie: Saul Bass.

Give to charity- The United Way, Girl Scouts: Saul Bass. While he of course listens to and respects the mute, visual language of the ancients, he is very much focused on the here and now and on the future. Bass recognized before anyone else the importance of a movie’s first few moments and the effects it can have on a viewer before the movie begins. He invented the idea of titling movies, either at the beginning or end, with sequences that added something that was symbolic to what was going on and created graphic identification for films that not only give name to what you are watching, but are able to unify and drive entire marketing and advertising campaigns.

Exodus movie poster.

Saul Bass,1960.

0419

Bass and his company have shown the world how to communicate and relate through symbols and have contributed tremendously to the design world. Bass died in April of 1996 in Los Angeles, California. His famous and renowned designs exemplified a highly innovative and easily memorable approach to design and was completely and utterly ahead of its time. (Seddon) He still remains one of the most popular, eccentric and influential graphic designers who has made an impact on the designs of many then and still to this day. He lived by his own words of, “I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. (Bos) It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”

“IT’S WORTH IT TO ME. IT’S THE WAY I WANT TO LIVE MY LIFE. I WANT TO MAKE BEAUTIFUL THINGS, EVEN IF NOBODY CARES.”

Saul Bass,1963.

21

REFEREN Biography by David R. Brown March 01. “1981 AIGA Medalist: Saul Bass.” AIGA | the Prow

fessional Association for Design, www.aiga.org/medalist-saulbass/.

Bos, Ben, and Elly Bos. AGI: Graphic Design since 1950. Thames & Hudson, 2007.

Douglas, Ava. “Saul Bass.” History of Graphic Design, www.historygraphicdesign.com/ the-age-of-information/the-new-york-school/182-saul-bass.

Maggs, Phillip B., and Purvis, Alston W. MEGGS’ History of Graphic Design. Hoboken, New

Jersey: John Wiley& Sons, Inc., 2016. Print.

“Saul Bass.” Art of the Title, www.artofthetitle.com/designer/saul-bass/.

Seddon, Tony. Twentieth Century Design: A Decade-by-Decade Exploration of Graphic

Style. 2014. Print.

“United Airlines Logo.” Famous Logos, 8 Oct. 2014, www.famouslogos.net/united-air lines-logo/.

Carmen Jones poster design. Saul Bass,1971.

22

CES

23

SAUL BASS Saul Bass was a prominent American graphic designer of the twentieth-century. He largely designed motion picture title sequences, corporate logos and movie posters. He was a pioneer of the modern title sequence designing.

He enjoyed four decades of successful career in his lifetime, winning Academy Award for his exquisite graphic designing. His iconic title sequences appeared in the popular films, such as, The Man with the Golden Arm, Psycho and North by Northwest.

$14.99

SAUL BASS THINKING MADE VISUAL

BY SHELBIE STUCKEY