Saul Bass (1920-1996) was an American graphic designer who
was known as one of the great pioneers of design in Hollywood, creating groundbreaking title sequences and film posters. He is the founder of conceptual cover design and also the creator of many corporate logos and identities.
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Y R O T S E
H 2. THE FILMS T . 1 S R E T S O P E 3. TH
S O G O L E H 4. T 5. THE ENDING
Sources http://annyas.com http://nytimes.com http://bass-saul.com http://designmuseum.org http://saulbassposterarchive.com
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PART ONE aul Bass was born May 8, 1920 in the Bronx, New York. As a child, he already possessed an artistic eye for drawing. In 1936, he began studying part time at the Art Students League in Manhattan. In 1938, he was hired as an assistant in the art department of the New York office of Warner Bros. Several years later, after joining the Blaine Thompson advertising agency, he enrolled at Brooklyn College and became acquainted with the man pictured above, György Kepes, a Hungarian artist and graphic designer. Kepes introduced Bass to the Russian Constructavist style and the Bauhaus style of László Moholy-Nagy. Kepes had worked with Moholy in Berlin in the 1930’s before fleeing to the United States.
After working for various design firms in Manhattan, Bass began working as a commercial artist until he moved to Los Angeles in 1946 to work as an art director for Buchanan and Company. In 1952, he opened his own design studio, Saul Bass & Associates, and began designing posters, title sequences, corporate logos, and other creative works. The following pages expand on these three major areas of Saul Bass’ design career. 4
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PART TWO oon after he had opened his own studio, Bass was asked to create a film poster for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones. After seeing the result, Bass was invited to also design the title sequence for the film. Following the movie’s release, Bass created title sequences for The Big Knife and The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe. Impressed by his work, Preminger commissioned Bass once again to design the title sequence for his newest film, The Man With the Golden Arm.
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MAKE THE ORDINARY ORDINARY It was this Preminger film that launched Bass’ career into a new world in Hollywood and established him as the master of film title design. With a new realization for the creative potential of a title sequence in a movie, Bass created a sequence that was a smash both in its time and today. After The Man With the Golden Arm, Bass continued to perfect his skills by creating an animated mini-movie for Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days in 1956. 8
Then in 1958, he was invited to work with Alfred Hitchcock for the first time in his latest film, Vertigo. In this sequence, he chose the woman’s eye as the single most important element of the film and displayed it along with spirals and a deep red to match the film’s sinister feeling. Bass continued to work with Hitchcock on two of his other iconic films, North by Northwest and Psycho.
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Bass was known to have an incredible ability to isolate the single most important element of a film and bring it to the audience’s attention in the opening credits. Scorsese once described Bass’ titles as “an emblematic image, instantly recognizable and immediately tied to the film.” Throughout his career, Bass worked exclusively with Otto Preminger in a mass amount of his films, in both poster and title sequence design. And amongst the large amount of titles he designed, Bass also worked alongside such amazing directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, James L. Brooks, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kramer, John Frankenheimer, and many more.
In 1968, he won an Oscar for his short film, Why Man Creates, an animated documentary which explored the nature of creativity. It wasn’t until he attempted to direct his first full length film, Phase IV, in 1974 that Bass returned to commercial graphic design. To the right is a complete list of the films Bass had the opportunity to design titles for in his career.
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• Casino • A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies • Higher Learning • The Age of Innocence • Mr. Saturday Night • Cape Fear • Preminger: Anatomy of a Filmmaker • Doc Hollywood • Goodfellas • The War of the Roses • Big • Broadcast News • The Human Factor • Alien • That’s Entertainment, Part II • Rosebud • Phase IV • Such Good Friends • Why Man Creates • Grand Prix • Seconds • Bunny Lake Is Missing • In Harm’s Way • The Cardinal • It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World • Nine Hours to Rama • Alcoa Premiere • Advise & Consent
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Walk on the Wild Side Something Wild West Side Story Exodus The Facts of Life Spartacus Ocean’s Eleven Psycho North by Northwest Anatomy of a Murder The Big Country Vertigo Bonjour Tristesse Cowboy The Pride and the Passion Saint Joan The Young Stranger Edge of the City Around the World in Eighty Days Attack Storm Center Johnny Concho The Man with the Golden Arm The Big Knife The Night of the Hunter The Shrike The Seven Year Itch The Racers Carmen Jones
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PART THREE
rior to Bass’ realization of his talent for title sequence design, he already possessed a strong ability to design amazing posters.
In fact, the vast majority of titles the he worked on were accompanied by posters that matched the sequence perfectly. These posters have a unique ability to use hand-drawn typographical solutions that are unlike any other designer. Bass’ simplistic, boxy letters are known throughout the design world to be far more difficult to create than they seem. These types of letters have been used throughout Bass’ posters and even included in such opening credits as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Carmen Jones.
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Film poster design prior to Saul Bass was most often approached in the same style. They would picture an important scene from the film or depict the main characters juxtaposed on the poster. But Saul Bass handled posters in the same way he handled his sequences. He displayed the key element of the film and brought it to the viewer’s attention.
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The poster he created for The Man with the Golden Arm, for example, was just as much of a smash as the title sequence. It showed the same iconic arm of a heroin addict along with off balance typography to show the struggle of the main character throughout the story. The same approach was taken in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, with the same sinister spiral of the opening credits being the central image of the poster. In this way, Bass’ titles and posters seem to be brothers and sisters to each other. They fit together perfectly, a fact which would not be so if the director had chosen a different artist.
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Films were not the only area of poster design for Saul Bass. He is also very well known for the creation of many other posters for such topics as human rights, the Oscars, film festivals, and even olympic games.
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PART FOUR
“IF I DO MY JOB WELL, THE IDENTITY PROGRAM WILL CLEAN UP THE IMAGE OF THE COMPANY AND POSITION IT AS BEING CONTEMPORARY AND KEEP IT FROM EVER LOOKING DATED”.
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s can already be seen from the work displayed thus far, Saul Bass’ abilities seem to stretch without limits. In addition to his work with films and posters, Bass is responsible for many logos and identities for major American corporations. His ultimate goal, as stated previously, was to create an image that would properly represent the brand of the company while remaining unconstrained by time.
Avery
Warner
41 Years
Years
United Girl Scouts Hannah-Barbera
40 Years 38
37 Years 20
Years
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And what would be to his great pleasure, Bass’ logos have done exactly that. According to a 2011 study, a logo designed by Saul Bass has an average lifespan of 34 years. In fact, the most common reason that a design is no longer in use is due to the downfall of a company rather than a logo redesign. Even those select few that did undergo a redesign most often based the new logo off of the original. Below is a list of the logos Bass is responsible for.
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Alcoa AT&T Corporation Avery International Bell Boys & Girls Club of America Celanese Continental Airlines Dixie Frontier Airlines Fuller Paints Geffen Records General Foods The Getty Center Girl Scouts of the USA Hannah-Barbera Japan Energy Corporation J. Paul Getty Trust
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Kibun Foods Kose Cosmetics Lawry’s Foods Minami sports Minolta NCR Corporation Quaker Oats Rockwell International Security Pacific Bank United Airlines United Way US postage stamp Warner Communications Wienerschnitzel Wesson Oil YWCA 21
PART FIVE
owards the end of his career, Saul Bass had a vast array of people, filmmakers and non-filmmakers, that longed to work with him.
In 1987, he was persuaded to work on the title sequence for Broadcast News by James Brooks and later the sequence for Penny Marshall’s Big, starring Tom Hanks. Bass then worked alongside a long-time admirer of his work, Martin Scorsese, who had grown up seeing his titles of the 50’s and 60’s. In collaboration with his wife Elaine, Bass created sequences for Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990, Cape Fear in 1991, The Age of Innocence in 1993, and Casino in 1995.
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The following year, Saul Bass was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He passed away on April 25, 1996 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Still carrying his legacy today are his four children and his granddaughter. His obituary in the New York Times named him “the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre and elevated it into an art.�
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