Saul Bass

Saul Bass was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese. He was born in the Bronx District in New York City in 1920. As a child, he drew a lot. He studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism. He was a freelance commercial artist/graphic designer until he opened up he own studio in 1950. Saul Bass was hired to design some posters and design title sequences for a few movies, but it wasn't until he was hired to design the poster and title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the "top banana" of film title design. His title sequences went from being graphics in motion to live action. He also liked dealing with ordinary things and making you look at them in a different way. He liked making the ordinary extraordinary. I like his style and I really enjoyed the way he dealt with the title sequence in West Side Story. I have always loved the dance sequences and of course the songs from this movie, but now I have a new appreciation for the title sequence at the end of the movie. I never really noticed or paid attention to the title sequence before, partly because I was pretty young when I watched the whole movie. I liked how the names were like they were part of the set instead of superimposed on the film, but were graffiti. Not only were his title sequences that were motion graphics interesting to watch, but his use of live action in the title sequences were equally as interesting to watch.

I was also surprised to find out all of the well known logos that he designed. It is hard for me to figure out how one person can hold that much talent in one human body. He died in 1996 and his New York Times obituary hailed him as "the minimalist auteur who put a jagged arm in motion in 1955 and created an entire film genre…and elevated it into an art."