Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) As a designer, to say you’re not a huge fan of arguably the world’s most famous graphic designer is just about sacrilege. I’ve always held a bit of a grudge when he rather testily claimed to have directed the ‘shower scene’ in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, I don’t know, but he didn’t have to be such a dick about it. Anyhow… He really did change the face of graphic design, with his bold flat colors and use of ‘paper cut’ imagery. He created posters for, among others, Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Kubrick and Scorsese. Better than his movie posters were his title sequences. Movie titles up to this point were mostly static, Bass created a very kinetic style, making the titles tell a story in motion. Check out the sequences for Psycho, North by Northwest and The Man with the Golden Arm on YouTube. They are great. So Happy Birthday Saul – you grouchy old (dead) bastard.
