Book Review: Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design

Not quite a credit to Mr Bass

A timely release about one of the great and influential designers of the last century and clearly Pat Kirkham has made this a scholarly work considering the amount of research involved. The title will most likely become the standard biography of Bass. Having said that I was disappointed to find the book had some editorial flaws in its presentation.

Millions of movie-goers are familiar with the stunning credits Bass created (sixty stills are included in a fold-out dateline in the back pages) from Carmen Jones in 1954 to Casino in 1995 and the book rightly devotes a large number of pages to credits and the marketing of these movies. My first disappointment is that a DVD was not included with the book. OK, I'll accept that this would involve a lot of extra work (and probably copyright fees to make the book even costlier) and it wasn't in the author's remit so the fall back position would be to show the credits in as much detail as possible: frame by frame to give the reader a feel of how Bass created these powerful opening movie statements. Unfortunately many of these credit stills throughout the book are treated more as individual images, in various sizes, rather than shown as a sequence of large thumbnails. Solana and Boneu's Uncredited: Graphic Design & Opening Titles in Movies [With DVD] book has a whole chapter on Bass credits and the pages work well. 'Anatomy of a murder' has thirty-two thumbnails, 'North by northwest' has twenty-four. In this book they get six and five.

Chapter six looks at the corporate work of Saul Bass and he worked for a lot of companies. The book's coverage is hardly comprehensive when this kind of design commission looks into every visual corner of a company. Mostly what is shown are a few samples: Fuller Paints gets five photos and a logo; Rockwell International three and a logo; Minolta two photos, two logos and five still thumbnails. These corporate pages throw up another disappointment I had with the book: presentation. Flick through the pages and it all looks clean and tidy but then start to read a chapter and I was aware of the large amounts of empty page space (working white as designers call it) where, as this is a book about a visual subject, images should be working much harder. These are pretty pages rather than practical pages that reveal the full potential of the images to the reader. A good example are two fold-outs showing sixteen logos to a page, actually they would have fitted easily on two pages but on four pages they should have been much larger without destroying the book's design integrity. A spread on AT&T (pages 330/331) has ten images and text that would easily fit on one page.

What I found absolutely fascinating were the fifteen pages of notes in the back pages. Predictably set in tiny type yet full of detail about Saul Bass, design and the design community he worked in.

The book's printing is excellent, a nice matt art for the 1484 images using an impressively fine screen (three hundred+) an embossed cover with the 'Bonjour tristesse' logo. 'Saul Bass' is certainly an interesting book but I thought the presentation didn't really display this wonderful designer's work to its full potential, especially his stunning movie credits.

Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Left: six credit images from Anatomy of a murder in the Bass book. Right: a much better feel of how they unfold on the screen, in the Uncredited book.

Left: a sequence of images that gives a much better feel for the flow of the North by Northwest credits. Right: only five used in the Bass book.

Letterheads.

1957 brochure for the California Test Bureau and really too small to be useful.

Just too much white space.

Fascinating roughs that need to be bigger to reveal the design process.

Alcoa design manual, the inside pages would be fascinating to any designer and there's space for them.

Does this image selection really sum up the Bass work for Fuller Paints?

Tiny pictures and plenty of white space. There are too many spreads like this where the editorial takes up less than 50% of the space.

Three brilliant movie posters.

A spread from the Notes at the back of the book. Full of fascinating detail.

Two fold-out pages of small logos, plenty of space to make them bigger.

Early poster work from 1949 to 1951.

Right: the stunning Casino credits work better here than the seven in the Bass book (left).

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