SAUL BASS (1920 –1996)

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Academy Award winning filmmaker, which at some point or another we always come by his work.  It might be a bit cliché, but Saul Bass really has done it all. He is known for design, films, packaging, architecture, branding & corporate identity, graphics, and movie posters. His work surrounds us.

During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.

Some of his most distinguished design works are corporate logos in North America, including the Bell System logo in 1969, as well as AT&T's globe logo in 1983 after the breakup of the Bell System. He also designed Continental Airlines' 1968 jet stream logo and United Airlines' 1974 tulip logo, which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.

Although born in the Bronx, New York City and studied Arts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he made the move to Hollywood in California back in the mid 1940s were he designing print adverts for films including Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951) and The Moon is Blue (1953), directed by Otto Preminger which made him widely known. His next collaboration with Preminger was to design a film poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Preminger was so impressed with Bass's work that he asked him to produce the title sequence as well. This was when Bass first saw the opportunity to create a title sequence which would ultimately enhance the experience of the audience and contribute to the mood and the theme of the movie within the opening moments. Bass was one of the first to understand the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie.

Saul Bass became commonly known in the film industry after he created the title sequence for Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The film was about a jazz musician and his struggle with heroin addiction. He created an original title sequence to match the film's controversial subject. He chose the arm as the central image, as it is a strong image relating to heroin addiction.

What really put him on the charts however, where the works he did for Alfred Hitchcock. These where to be the more memorable title sequences, as he invented a new kind of typography for each different movie.  This was revolutionary work as before the title sequences back in the 1950s were generally static and apart from the movie.  They didn’t tie into the style.  Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as being to ‘’try to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story”.  He wanted to make the audiences also see familiar parts of their world in an unfamiliar way.

He designed title sequences for more than 40 years, and employed diverse film making techniques, from cut-out animation for Anatomy of a Murder (1958), to fully animated mini-movies such as the epilogue for Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and live action sequences.   He is known and worked on other great projects such as the title sequence to Grand Prix (1966) portrays the moments before the opening race in Monte Carlo which was very innovative for that time.

Toward the end of his career he worked with great names by the likes of James L. Brooks and Martin Scorsese.  With Martin Scorsese he started to make use of new techniques that he pioneered and moved into the use of computerised effects. Bass’s title sequences featured new and innovative methods of production and startling graphic design.  He had a long and prolific carrier and made many works which we are all familiar with and although his record is wide, thoughtful and deep, it is a prologue: to what's surely to come, and to the man himself.

Bibliography

Meggs, P. B., & Purvis, A. W. (2012). Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (Fifth ed.). Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Wikipedia, t. f. (8, December 2014). Saul Bass. Retrieved January 2015, 24, from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bass