ICM - Leeds Design Agency

If you’ve got 12 minutes to spare, I can highly recommend watching this mini-documentary on the artists who still hand paint advertising billboards in New York.

It’s wonderfully filmed, and these guys are unbelievable talented. Enjoy.

UP THERE from The Ritual Project on Vimeo.<…

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So the 2010 Winter Olympics are under way. Here’s a chance to look at some of the poster art that has publicised the event throughout the years:

See the full set, from 1924 to 2010, here....

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After writing a blog on Otl Aicher’s finest set of sports posters I thought I’d follow it up with what I consider to be the finest film posters.

Saul Bass (1920-1996) is one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century. During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.

Saul Bass was born in New York on May 8th 1920 and studied Graphic Art at Brooklyn College, NY before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. Bass was a pioneer of the pared down graphic, favouring minimalist symbolic images, which had been in vogue since he began designing for the film industry in the early 1950s.

For The Man with the Golden Arm a film about the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra, Saul Bass chose to base the design on a black cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it, rather than showing Frank Sinatra’s famous face, as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

For Vertigo Bass used the motif of the revolving Spirograph to evoke the dizzying sensations of the film, in all of his posters he seems to be offering the audiences a taste of the atmosphere and what story was about to unfold.

Unlike most of todays modern posters when looking at these posters it gets to the core of what the film is about, not who is in it or what fancy special effects are used. I think this is why movie posters today are not viewed as an art form any more. Which is a real shame as some of the themes in films are integral to society and what is going on in the wor…

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