Great graphic designers

Saul Bass - Film Sequence revolutionary  

You could be forgiven for asking the question: 

“Saul Bass, whose he?” 

The chances are, however, that if you’ve ever watched an Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger or Martin Scorsese film then you have already seen some of his work.

Saul Bass is not only one of the greatest graphic designers of the mid 20th Century (therefore securing his eighth position in the AnsteyDesign top ten) but he is also the undisputed master of film title design. 

In today’s modern cinematic world we are used to seeing graphical film titles, we expect them. But in 1955 they were unheard of. In fact film titles used to be so dull that cinema projectionists would let the film titles roll whilst the curtains where down – saving the audience the boredom of viewing them.

However, this all changed with Otto Preminger’s controversial film ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’. For his film the director had employed Saul Bass to create a title sequence, which “would be integral to the film”. The film reels where then supplied to cinemas across the world with the instructions: “Projectionists – Pull curtain before titles”.  And so a revolution in film titles began and Saul Bass started what would become one of the most influential design careers of the mid 20th Century. 

By the end of his life (he died in 1996) Bass had created over 50 film title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. (Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing because it was so imitated").

But even before he had started on his journey of revolutionising cinema Bass was a celebrated graphic designer.

He’d been born in New York in 1920 and, after a fairly ordinary childhood, went to study 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. It was Kepes who introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus (a modernist movement which originated in Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War) style and to Russian Constructivism.

Once he’d completed his study he went on to open his own studio in LA and worked mainly in advertising until Preminger asked him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.

There are many films that you will have seen that feature Saul Bass’s work:

Vertigo, Pyscho, North by Northwest, Grand Prix, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear to name just a few.

There are few graphic designers who can claim to have sparked an entire genre into life. Saul Bass can make that claim and for that reason he deserves his place in our list of greatest graphic designers of the 20^th Century. 

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