Jan-Christopher Horak
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813147185
- eISBN:
- 9780813154787
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813147185.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Like many designers, Saul Bass was loath to discuss his work in a theoretical framework. He spent almost fifteen years working in studio publicity before founding his own design studio. In the ...
More
Like many designers, Saul Bass was loath to discuss his work in a theoretical framework. He spent almost fifteen years working in studio publicity before founding his own design studio. In the mid-1940s Bass came under the spell of Bauhaus design aesthetics through books by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, translating their work into an American idiom for corporate design. Bass jettisoned much of Gestalt theory and adopted Bauhaus principles of clean, uncluttered design based on sans serif type and basic geometric shapes to communicate modernity to post–World War II consumers. Prior to Bass, Hollywood film advertising was no more than sophisticated ballyhoo. Bass pared down the cluttered look of most movie ads and created a distinct brand consisting of strong graphic elements, modern typography, geometric ordering of the two-dimensional space, a limited color palette (mostly primary colors or coordinated pastels), a simple iconographic element at the center, and a catalog of “house” images.Less
Like many designers, Saul Bass was loath to discuss his work in a theoretical framework. He spent almost fifteen years working in studio publicity before founding his own design studio. In the mid-1940s Bass came under the spell of Bauhaus design aesthetics through books by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes, translating their work into an American idiom for corporate design. Bass jettisoned much of Gestalt theory and adopted Bauhaus principles of clean, uncluttered design based on sans serif type and basic geometric shapes to communicate modernity to post–World War II consumers. Prior to Bass, Hollywood film advertising was no more than sophisticated ballyhoo. Bass pared down the cluttered look of most movie ads and created a distinct brand consisting of strong graphic elements, modern typography, geometric ordering of the two-dimensional space, a limited color palette (mostly primary colors or coordinated pastels), a simple iconographic element at the center, and a catalog of “house” images.
Jan-Christopher Horak
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813147185
- eISBN:
- 9780813154787
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813147185.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Saul Bass defined an era. He designed movie posters, studio publicity, credit sequences for films, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, and he was an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. As a ...
More
Saul Bass defined an era. He designed movie posters, studio publicity, credit sequences for films, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, and he was an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. As a result, Bass changed the look of both film advertising and cinema itself. Bass’s advertising, poster designs, and title sequences for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. All his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from European modernist art and avant-garde cinema, creating a new, Americanized commercial mode of address and thereby transforming conventions that had remained relatively stagnant for decades. Inserting himself directly into the Hollywood film production process, Bass necessarily complicated the conception of film authorship, especially because his titles designs were often discussed independently from the films they introduced. Bass influenced not only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole generation of young designers, many of whom he personally trained in his studio.Less
Saul Bass defined an era. He designed movie posters, studio publicity, credit sequences for films, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, and he was an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. As a result, Bass changed the look of both film advertising and cinema itself. Bass’s advertising, poster designs, and title sequences for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. All his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from European modernist art and avant-garde cinema, creating a new, Americanized commercial mode of address and thereby transforming conventions that had remained relatively stagnant for decades. Inserting himself directly into the Hollywood film production process, Bass necessarily complicated the conception of film authorship, especially because his titles designs were often discussed independently from the films they introduced. Bass influenced not only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole generation of young designers, many of whom he personally trained in his studio.
