SAUL BASS
American graphic designer and Academy Award winning film maker (Why Man Creates), Saul Bass was a man whose works touched not just designers, students, or observers of design, but simply people.
Introduction
Bass was born on May 8 1920 in the Bronx, New York. He did his graduation from James Monroe High School and was given a scholarship to the Art Students League in 1936. From 1944 until 1946 Saul Bass studied at Brooklyn College.
He worked in New York as a freelance commercial artist for advertising agencies and companies, including Warner Bros. In 1946 he went to Los Angeles, where he continued to work as a commercial artist. By 1952 he had a practice of his own, which was registered from 1955 as Saul Bass & Associates.
In 1954 he received his first commission from the director Otto Preminger to design the title sequence for his film “Carmen Jones”
Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie.
Saul and his Work
Bass once described his main goal for his title sequences as “trying to reach for a simple, visual phrase that tells you what the picture is all about and evokes the essence of the story”. Another philosophy that Bass described as influencing his title sequences was the goal of getting the audience to see familiar parts of their world in an unfamiliar way. Examples of this or what he described as “making the ordinary extraordinary” can be seen in Walk on the Wild Side (1962) where an ordinary cat becomes a mysterious prowling predator, and in Nine Hours to Rama (1963) where the interior workings of a clock become an expansive new landscape
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. Among his most famous title sequences is the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm for Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm.
Bass was responsible for some of the best-remembered, most iconic logos in America, including the Bell Telephone logo (1969), successor AT&T globe (1983), Continental Airlines (1968), Dixie (1969) and United Airlines (1974). Later, he produced logos for a number of Japanese companies as well.
Bass used his innovative ideas and unique perspective of the world to influence his art, engaging his audiences and developing the graphic design industry in the process. He developed a simplified, symbolic design language that visually communicated all the essential elements of a film. Bass designed emblematic posters that made a stunning visual impact, thus revolutionizing animated film graphics and the visuals of film advertising.
“There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I’m a working man. Perhaps I’m luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good.”
It was his ground to earth attitude that perhaps makes him stand out now as one of the best graphic designers that the world has ever seen.
