Saul Bass was a famed film title designer, who worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo (1958), North By Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) alongside many other films. From this same era Anatomy of a Murder (1959, dir. Otto Preminger) is a particularly worthy case.
As a designer of studio publicity, movie posters, title sequences and montages, commercials, and corporate logos from the 1940s to the 1990s, Bass heavily influenced the look of both film advertising and Hollywood films. Bass’s poster designs and his credit sequences for Hollywood feature films were extremely innovative in terms of their formal design, use of iconography, and narrative content. His graphic work resembled no one else’s in Hollywood, and his film credits changed forever how audiences looked at the opening minutes of a film. Simultaneously, all his film-related work incorporated aesthetic concepts borrowed from modernist art, translating them into new commercial modes of address and thereby transforming film industry conventions that had remained relatively stagnant for decades. Bass’s designs influenced not only other studio publicity designers and filmmakers but also a whole generation of young designers that he personally trained in his studio.
-- Jan-Christopher Horak in Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design
