Saul Bass

1. What it is — A single-sheet poster for Preminger's film about heroin addiction, lithograph, 1955; the first time a poster and a title sequence share the same graphic system. Signed Bass (signature visible by the blue stripe).
2. Composition — Cream surface divided into irregular "collage" blocks: petrol-blue and black rectangle at the top, a jagged black stripe through the middle out of which a hand is "cut," reaching diagonally downward, two narrow photographs (Sinatra right, Novak/Parker left) wedged into the black block, blue and purple horizontal band at the bottom with a third photograph. The eye doesn't follow the centre but the diagonal of the arm, from the upper black block down to the tiny black hand at the bottom of the title text.
3. Colour — Four flat colours (petrol, black, indigo-blue, purple) on a cream ground, no gradient and no photographic colour reproduction — the photographs are black and white, inserted as material, not as tone.
4. Typography — Hand-lettered narrow capitals (Harold Adler), gold on black, jagged edges that follow the jaggedness of the arm itself — letter and symbol share the same cut, they aren't two different crafts joined afterward.
5. Message — Three-second test: the jagged black arm on a light ground reads as "broken body" before a single letter of the title is read. From five metres the silhouette of the arm and the film's name remain recognisable.
6. Why exactly this way — The studio wanted to sell the stars (Sinatra, Novak, Parker); Preminger agreed to let the symbol of addiction dominate over the actors' faces — a rare concession for a Hollywood poster in 1955.
7. What would kill it — Replacing the jagged, broken line of the arm with a smooth, "tidy" silhouette — it is precisely the tremor of the cut that is the visual equivalent of the "broken" life of the addict, which Bass speaks of in his own statement of intent.

Principles: Reduction to one moving gesture Fragmented body as symbol Design to the music's beat To verify against the image: the exact dimensions of the poster are not confirmed.

1. What it is — Single-sheet poster for the Hitchcock film, 1958; shares the spiral motif with the title sequence Bass made with John Whitney (Lissajous curves generated on a mechanical analogue computer — one of the first uses of computer graphics in film).
2. Composition — The whole surface is one saturated orange plane; in the centre a concentric spiral of white/cream lines that pulls the eye in toward the middle, where a black silhouette of a man falls together with an outline (not black, just a contour line) silhouette of a woman — two different drawing techniques for two bodies in the same fall. The film title in a narrow hand-lettered face at the bottom, the actors' names in the same lettering at the top — the text frames the spiral, doesn't cut into it.
3. Colour — Essentially two values: the orange field and the whiteness of the spiral, with a small red oval at the very centre of the vortex — a minimal palette that heightens the optical vertigo effect without a single extra colour.
4. Typography — Narrow, hand-lettered capitals, the same texture as Golden Arm but less jagged — here the subject is dizziness, not breakage.
5. Message — Three-second test: spiral + falling body = a physical sense of vertigo before a single word is read; the title "VERTIGO" arrives only as confirmation of what the eye has already felt.
6. Why exactly this way — The film is about obsession and loss of balance; the spiral is the only geometric shape that literally simulates that state on a static poster surface, without a single figurative scene from the film.
7. What would kill it — A static, concentric target without falling figures — the spiral alone would be decorative; only the fall of two bodies through it turns it into a psychological symbol, not an optical toy.

Principles: Reduction to one moving gesture The sequence is part of the film To verify against the image: The exact share of Bass's versus Whitney's contribution to the technical execution of the spiral is not confirmed — Whitney built the curves on a machine, Bass directed the graphic concept.

1. What it is — A single-sheet poster for Preminger's courtroom drama, 1959. The year has been corrected to match the film's premiere date.
2. Composition — A human figure taken apart like a broken toy: torso, two legs, two forearms placed separately on an orange ground, each part slightly offset from the next, as if the body had been dissected. The film's title is lettered inside the torso itself.
3. Colour — Orange gradient, lighter at the top, darker at the bottom, with a black silhouette of the figure. The lower half of the poster shifts into a more saturated orange field with the cast list in outline lettering.
4. Typography — Hand-lettered type placed inside the body of the figure. The title is not separated from the image but literally sits "inside" the cut-up torso.
5. Message — Three-second test: the dismembered body reads as "anatomy," shown before the word "murder" is read. The poster stages the film's own title as a visual code.
6. Why exactly this way — The film is a courtroom drama about a murder, not an action film with on-screen violence. The fragmentation is abstract and graphic, not literal blood, which allows the subject to pass without censorship risk in 1959.
7. What would kill it — Reassembling the figure into a whole body. The moment the parts join, the precise image is lost that turns the title "anatomy of a murder" into a picture, not a metaphor.

Principles: Fragmented body as symbol Razor cut as texture To verify against the image: exact poster dimensions are not given in the record.

1. What it is — A single-sheet poster for Preminger's political drama about the confirmation of a cabinet appointment in the Senate, 1962.
2. Composition — Red surface; at the top a hand (only forearm and palm) holds a handle as if of a bag or a briefcase, from which hangs a price tag bearing the silhouette of the Capitol dome and the film's title — the cast list is lettered directly on the "bag" between the hand and the tag.
3. Colour — Saturated red surface, black hand and text, white tag — only three values, maximum contrast between the "goods" (red field) and the "price" (white label).
4. Typography — Hand-lettered type for the cast list, fitted into the outline of the bag; tighter, outline letters for the film's title on the tag.
5. Message — Three-second test: politics (the Capitol) has a price (the tag) and someone holding it in hand (the bag) — the whole political intrigue of the film is reduced to an act of buying and selling before a single actor's name is read.
6. Why exactly this way — The film is about voting, extortion, and trading influence in the Senate; the metaphor of purchase directly translates the theme into an object, without illustrating any specific scene from the film.
7. What would kill it — If the tag did not hang from the hand but stood separately — the link between "someone is holding/controlling" (the hand) and "what is being sold" (the label) has to be physically, not just compositionally, joined.

Principles: Object as metaphor Reduction to one moving gesture To verify against the image: The exact dimensions of the poster are not confirmed.

1. What it is — Corporate mark for American Telephone & Telegraph and its 23 regional companies ("Bell System"), 1969 — the sixth version of the bell since 1889. Accompanied by a logotype in Helvetica with custom spacing; introduced through the largest rebranding programme in American history (around 135,000 vehicles, 22,000 buildings, 1.25 million payphones, over a dozen manuals).
2. Composition — Full silhouette of a bell (not a line drawing but a solid shape) set inside a circle, both elements built with the same, uniform line weight — the circle and the bell share the same "wall" thickness, so at small size (the mark on a payphone) no detail disappears.
3. Colour — One colour, "Bell Blue" on a white ground for the mark; black text on white for the logotype — the system is built to work in a single colour too (stamped into metal, engraved, etc.).
4. Typography — Logotype in Helvetica, with hand-adjusted letterspacing (not the font's standard kerning) — part of the identity manual.
5. Message — One object (a bell) recognisable at any distance and in any application — "every impression contributes to the whole, every signal is part of the mosaic" (Bass's own formulation in the pitch film for AT&T leadership).
6. Why exactly this way — In 1969 the company had 23 different regional versions of the bell with no unified typography; the brief wasn't "a new symbol" but one symbol able to carry thousands of different materials and sizes without losing legibility.
7. What would kill it — Over-detailing the bell (a shadow, an outline instead of a solid silhouette, a circle line thinner than the bell's line) — any mismatched line weight breaks the impression that the mark is one continuous cut, not an assembled illustration.

Principles: Mark as one line of even weight To verify against the image: The exact appearance of the earlier five versions of the bell (1889–1969) has not been verified.

1. What it is — Corporate mark for AT&T Corporation, 1983, a direct consequence of the antitrust breakup of the Bell System (1982-84), when AT&T was no longer allowed to keep the "Bell" name or mark. AGI credits the mark to Bass, successor to his 1969 Bell System mark.
2. Composition — Horizontal bands of varying width arranged so that the density and spacing of the bands alone create the illusion of a sphere (globe) without a single curved line drawn literally. The principle is the same as with the bell — line builds form — applied to a completely different subject.
3. Colour — A blue version (the best known) and a black-and-white version for single-colour reproduction. The same test as in 1969: the mark must work in one colour.
4. Typography — "AT&T" logotype in Helvetica, a bolder cut, set directly alongside the globe in a horizontal arrangement.
5. Message — Global communication expressed without a single literal element — no telephone, no cable, no continents. The form of the sphere made of lines alone carries the meaning.
6. Why exactly this way — The company was transforming itself from a regional telephone monopoly into a global player. The bell was tied to American telephony; the globe is tied to no technology or territory.
7. What would kill it — A full, closed sphere silhouette instead of bands. It would lose exactly the quality — transparency, a mesh of lines — that makes the mark feel more modern than a solid, corporate ball.

Principles: Mark as one line of even weight To verify against the image: Sources disagree on the number of bands and the revision years — twelve bands 1983-1999 according to one source, a change to eight bands in 1999 according to another, and the Wikimedia file record further confuses them. Treated here as a construction principle, not as an exact band count.

1. What it is — Record sleeve for the music from Preminger's film (composer Georges Auric), lithograph, gift from the designer himself to MoMA; 29.2 × 30.8 cm. The copy circulating on collector sites is a later reissue (label "Milan") with the same drawing. MoMA's copy is the authentic 1957 piece.
2. Composition — A face simplified into three strokes: eyebrow, eye with a tear, nose/mouth — all compressed into the upper half of a square surface, the lower half empty yellow.
3. Colour — Mustard-yellow ground, turquoise-blue line for the face, a single teardrop in black as the only accent outside those two colours.
4. Typography — Hand-lettered, narrow letterforms for the film title, the composer, and "original motion picture soundtrack" — bolder than the poster titles, legible at the small scale of a record sleeve.
5. Message — "Tristesse" (sadness) literally as a tear on the face before the title is even read — the sleeve translates the title of the novel/film into a single pictogram.
6. Why exactly this way — The format is a record sleeve, not a poster — a smaller surface and a square format demand an even higher degree of reduction than a poster by the same designer from the same year.
7. What would kill it — A more realistic face (nose, lips, eyebrows fully drawn) — the moment the face becomes a portrait rather than a pictogram, the direct link between the form and the one word of the title is lost.

Principles: Hand gesture against the cut Object as metaphor To verify against the image: The difference in ground colour saturation between the RCA Victor 1957 pressing and the later "Milan" reissue has not been measured with an instrument, only assessed visually.

1. What it is — One-sheet poster for Wilder's Cold War comedy, 1961, shot in West Berlin.
2. Composition — A rough, marker-drawn female face near the top; three white balloons with the words "ONE TWO THREE" hand-lettered on them; a black silhouette of a hand at the bottom holding the balloon strings.
3. Colour — Saturated orange ground (the same colour family as Anatomy of a Murder from the same decade), black-and-white figures with no shading or gradient.
4. Typography — Hand-lettered, deliberately unskilled letterforms (marker, imperfect spacing) — the opposite of the precisely cut posters made for dramas.
5. Message — The three-second test: a childlike drawing (a balloon, a rough face) signals comedy before a single actor's name is read — the drawing's register announces the genre on its own.
6. Why exactly this way — The film is a farce, not a drama; the same reductive method (one gesture, little colour) is here translated into an unskilled, quick drawing instead of a precise paper cut — proof that the method adapts to tone, it is not a fixed style.
7. What would kill it — A more precise, "tidier" drawn face would lose the humour that comes precisely from the drawing's clumsiness; this poster works because it looks unfinished.

Principles: Hand gesture against the cut To verify against the image: Nothing critical; the composition and technique are clearly visible on the available scan.