Computer Animation Arts

All our recent Hitchcock movies have inspired me to share this: a potted history of the art, design and evolution of film titles, including the work of Saul Bass, who designed a number of Hitchcock's opening titles so memorably.

Saul Bass   "I want to make beautiful things...even if nobody cares." In the last few years a simplicity and modernity has arisen in the world of graphic design. This style of design may be considered unique by some, but one of the fathers of such design is Saul Bass. He is best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, creating some of the best credit sequences of all time and assisting with the storyboard process of the famous  Psycho  shower sequence. Bass' title sequences have become well loved by the design world, setting up some of Hitchcock's masterpieces from the very outset. This is the magic of Bass' design, within 20 seconds we are introduced to a film with exactly the correct tone and mindset. He takes the viewer from darkness to the opening scene in the perfect way, with stunning yet simple graphics that not only stood out at the time but now are the icon for a medium itself. There is a threshold in art and design where a ...

  With the imminent release of Sam Mendes' new Bond adventure, Skyfall , Ian Fleming's original novels are being reissued by Vintage here in the UK and by Amazon in the US.  It's a minimalist graphic-design smack-down between the two companies, and they're compared and contrasted here for viewing pleasure.  Saul Bass looms large - never a bad thing - and the best of these just go to prove that sometimes there's nothing more chic than a bit of text and lots of negative space!

"Saul Bass' body of work distinguishes him as one of the most versatile and innovative graphic designers of the 20th Century. Alongside his talent for creating definitive visual references in the form of film poster campaigns and title sequences stands his later work as an Academy Award Winning director for his short film 'Why Man Creates' (1969). In the course of his career, Bass worked with Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock, and his legacy is evident in the work of numerous contemporary designers and directors... The effectiveness of his imagery is undeniable, resulting from his constant striving for perfection and his optimistic rejection of stuffy and uninspired conventions, which governed the majority of American poster designers from the 1940s. Saul Bass was born in New York on May 8th 1920 and studied Graphic Art at Brooklyn College, NY before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. Bass was a pioneer of the pared down graphic, favouring minimalist sym...