Saul Bass:
Saul Bass was born on May 8th 1920 in Bronx, New York and died on April 25th 1996 in Los Angeles. As a child he drew constantly and went on to study at the Art Students League in Manhattan after winning a scholarship to attend the school. He then got apprenticeships at Manhattan design firms, until finally landing at the Blaine Thompson Company advertising agency. Next, he enrolled at Brooklyn College where the Hungarian designer Gyorgy Kepes heavily influenced him. Kepes exposed Bass to the German Bauhaus style and Russian constructivism. After Brooklyn Bass uprooted and immigrated to Los Angeles where he first worked as an art director at Buchanan and Company (an advertising agency) but shortly after established his own studio called Saul Bass & Associates. While working at his studio he began to break into the film industry and make his mark, after first being commissioned to create titles for Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. His true impact on the film industry and the art of film came when he created movie posters and the title sequences of Preminger’s The Man with a Golden Arm in 1955. Before Bass’s interpretation on movie title sequences they had been drab, dull, simple, and more importantly so boring that projectionists wouldn’t even pull the curtain until the movie started. Bass created an opening title sequence of a black cut-out arm a powerful symbol of addiction, the major theme in the film.
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| Bass's poster for The Man with the Golden Arm Source: http://library.rit.edu/gda/designer/saul-bass |
After the major impact from The Man with the Golden Arm Bass went on to create over 50 title sequences for major directors including Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Most notably he worked closely with Hitchcock to create titles for movies including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. During Psycho Hitchcock allowed Bass to direct some of the dramatic sequences including the famous shower scene. Bass then when on to direct a series of shorts the last – titled Why Man Creates – actually wins him an Oscar in 1968. Feeling emboldened by this win he went on to direct a feature-length film titled Phase IV in 1974, but after it flopped he began to focus more on commercial graphic design creating the logos for United Airlines, AT&T, Minolta, Warner Communications, and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. It was until later in his life that he worked on a few more title sequences including GoodFellas, Schlinder’s List, and Cape Fear before he passed away in 1996 of Lymphoma.
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| A piece of Bass's work which I was quite surprised he had done. Source: http://corin.wegotways.com/2010/03/23/saul-bass/ |
Personally, I find Saul Bass to be a huge source of inspiration for me in terms of design. He not only influenced the world of design and film but he also created so many new ways in which design and its principles can be utilized. His work in the film industry was visually stunning, edgy and used simple images or symbols to drive the observer straight to the meaning of the entire piece. He was successful not only commercially but had enormous influence on the film industry, which is an amount of success that I can only aspire to.
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| Saul himself with some of his commercial work. Source: http://filmicability.blogspot.com/2009/01/saul-bass.html |
Sources:
"Saul Bass / - Design/Designer Information." Design Museum London. Web. 13 Apr. 2011. <http://designmuseum.org/design/saul-bass>.
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