Top 40 Saul Bass Quotes

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

The very first pieces of film that I did were really graphic designs translated to film. Graphic designs that moved. That was a very new notion.

The key to industrial leadership is technology and design; of the two, technology is quantifiable and design is not. Technological improvements might make your product worth another $20. If you design something beautiful, what is that worth? It’s worth whatever people will pay for it.

The goal, and the ultimate achievement, is to make people feel as well as think.

I’m a filmmaker and I intend to continue making films of all kinds, in any manner, shape, or form – short or long.

My work on titles was a marvelous opportunity to learn about filmmaking. I think I touched on just about every aspect of the process, both creative and technical. And I worked with many wonderful people.

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

This is my real concern: to give each film a unique individuality.

When a well-known creative person such as me is perceived to have created a knockoff of my own previous work, such a perception is a mortal blow to my reputation as a creative person.

Way back in the beginning, I would say in the 20s, when titles were first being treated for films, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. Everybody was inventing. There were no conventions. Everything was up for grabs.

I work on the assumption that in the crowded mass communication field today you have to get in and get out with your message as quickly and simply as possible. You must communicate the maximum with a single glance.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

In the course of our daily lives, we’re bombarded with a barrage of visual messages, some blatantly aggressive, some subtle. The trick is to find a way to break through without adding to the clutter and the ugliness. We have to be responsible about that.

The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable.

When I provided the disembodied arm as the logo for ‘The Man With the Golden Arm,’ it was the first time an advertising-publicity campaign was based on a single symbol. Until then film companies used a variety of symbols and photographs to cover all bets. The concept of using one logo was mine and Otto Preminger’s.

We are truly bombarded by images. To break through and be observed, let alone focused on, you have to have impact and power.

To engage in downright plagiarism is disappointing. It’s cynical, opportunistic and hypocritical.

At one point it occurred to me that the title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue.

I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life.

Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

The only way I work as a designer is to consciously avoid specialisation.

In ‘Age of Innocence,’ the opening flowers, that’s a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.

When Braniff abandoned stripes, they wound up with a flying jelly bean and that’s not a good feeling for passengers.

I had felt for some time that audience involvement with a film should begin with its first frame.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

A corporation trademark represents a total program for a company. A good symbol will implement its products. Normally such a symbol will be around for an indefinite future 10, 20, 30 years or more.

Tampering with humanity is pretty scary.

Design is thinking made visual.

Interestingly enough, the storyboard… that I did for ‘Psycho’ went precisely as I laid it up, and there was no change on that. And frankly, I myself at that point didn’t even really understand the impact that some of these things would have.

I shattered the notion that a movie had to be advertised with realistic elements from the story.

If it’s simple simple, it’s boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think and rethink.

The average individual lives in a high impact, complex, visual environment.

Hitchcock loved long convoluted shots that contained a lot of tracking and camera moves.

I think that the sun*like rainbow growing out of the hand is open to many alternate positive interpretations. One may say it’s the hand of the United Way bringing hope to people. But it helps signal that United Way is vibrant, exciting, colorful, positive and changing.

In TV you have to open a show the subject, you deal with an idea. Then you deal with a sponsor – but fast. Then you have to announce the guest stars. As a result, you have a big fat 30, 40 seconds – 50 if they really lose their heads – to put together an unbelievable mishmash.

The products people like best start with function and wind up with look.

A product is often a consumer’s only window to a corporation.

I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

My view… was that something could happen during the credits that could help the film, so that the establishing shots aren’t carrying the total burden.

If the titles are treated in a straightforward way, nobody is really interested. The theory is that in those two or three minutes, you can set the tone for the films, so that when the story begins the audience hits the ground running.