Saul Bass celebration
animates Google's name in several different styles, playing on the
designer's best-known credit sequences. Photograph: Google/screen grab
Google has marked the birthday of Saul Bass with one of
the search engine's
most elaborate "doodles" yet – an animated sequence based on his
designs for film title credits, film posters and corporate logos.
Bass, who died in 1996, worked with film-makers including
Alfred Hitchcock,
Billy Wilder,
Stanley Kubrick and
Martin Scorsese over the course of a 40-year career, approaching his commissions in the spirit of a graphic design problem to be solved.
Launch the Saul Bass poster gallery ▶
Photographs: Saul Bass estate/BFI
Born into an immigrant family in New York's Bronx, he began working
on print work for film adverts in Hollywood during the 1940s. A
breakthrough came in the film industry when he was hired in 1954 by Otto
Preminger to create an innovative title sequence for the credits of the
film, Carmen Jones, which he did using an animated flaming rose. Until
the 1950s, the normal method for film credits was to present names and
titles on cards, or against an unmoving backdrop.
The following year, Bass's credit sequence for another production,
The Man With the Golden Arm,
played again with a strong graphic image – white lines rearranging
themselves into a twisted arm – which was carried over into the film's
publicity, prefiguring the corporate identity approach of modern film
advertising.
Bass later worked for Alfred Hitchcock on
North by Northwest and Psycho, once again using his favoured lines, which morphed into a vortex of whirling spirals in the opening credits of
Vertigo.
After a lull in the 1960s, he made a comeback in the 1970s. His last
completed credits sequence was for Casino, which featured Robert De Niro being blasted by a car bomb through a raging inferno of Las Vegas neon in Casino.