Saul Bass (1920- 1996) was an American graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos. he has worked with Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock on influential film title sequences. Saul Bass extended the boundaries of graphic design in the mid-twentieth century by devising a new approach to the packaging and marketing of films. In discovering parallels between the visual identity of film and other industrial products, he permanently changed the character of promotion, while also giving the films he worked on a strong and memorable form. One distinctive feature was the reduction of graphic elements to a minimum, as with the simple paper cut-outs used in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Before Bass’s seminal poster for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), movie posters were dominated by depictions of key scenes or characters from the film, often both juxtaposed with each other. This was Bass’s earliest film poster to use torn paper, here mixed with action shots of the stars. The jagged arm, used on a range of posters and press advertisements, became a powerful visual symbol for the film. Bass’s posters, however, typically developed simplified, symbolic designs that visually communicated key essential elements of the film.
GRAPHIC DESIGN 