Saul Bass Essay

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For half a century, every title of films has been designed very seriously. These titles reflect the main elements or impression of the story in a dynamic form. Tracing the source, the well-designed movie titles are derived from an American designer, Saul Bass. Saul Bass is a graphic designer who graduated from Brooklyn College and studied under Gyorgy Kepes, a master of the functional Bauhaus aesthetic (Bigman, 2015). In his whole career, he had done a lot of other things, including logos, advertisements, posters, title sequences and even movies. Most people remember his title works so that most recent movies have a strange sense of great design titles and credits. Among recent title designers, no one can deny that he/she has a piece influence by Saul Bass. As a graphic designer,Saul Bass made a profound influence on the film titles. But, how did Saul combine the design and film well? In this paper, several reasons - design style, cooperation experience and advance interdisciplinary …show more content…

When Preminger asked Saul Bass to design a poster for the film he was so taken by the “jagged arm” symbol that he asked Bass to design titles using the same elements (Kirkham, 2011). This film was about drug addiction. In the title sequence, the symbol “ the arm” in its jagged form expressed the disjointed, jarring existence of the drug addict (Kirkham, 2011) (see Appendix A). The release of this film certainly caused quite a sensation at that time. Also, Bass felt pleased in the process of working with Preminger. Perhaps for a designer,a good mood would better stimulate creative inspiration. Bass once commented, “A man who I worked and fought with over the years and learned to love and appreciate” (p.114). He is the first designer who put the symbolic element from movie posters into title

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