ICM - Leeds Design Agency

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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Otl Aicher created possible the finest set of sports posters for the 1972 Olympics, and I’d go as far as saying the finest sports posters ever. He is held in such high regard over his involvement with that olympics that he set the bench mark for many future designs.The posters are timeless and wouldn’t look out of place at this years olympics.

What made them so great was the fact they captured the nature of each event they represented, simplistic yet bold and with great use of typography.

The canoe and 100 metre sprint posters capture the movement of the sport so well because of their simplicity, straight lines on the track give the feeling of speed, and the mass of texture on the canoe poster make you feel the power of the rapids.

The boxing poster has an certain intensity because of the contrasting colours, almost looking like a thermal image you can feel the heat of the two boxers.

In contrast the on archery poster you get a sense of concentration due to the calmness of the olympians face.

I’m really looking forward to the 2012 London olympics posters and hope they live up to the standards set by a truly great design…

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Part 2 of band poster is here, click here for a look back on part 1

This Lomita really benefits from being two colour. In the background old newspaper clippings add depth, and in the fore ground stylish hand written typography dominates, grabbing your attention.

Band of Horses are an Interesting band with a interesting vocal style, The poster is advertising a show in Dallas and seems to have a Western feel to it, what looks like the corner of a dollar bill points to the text which has an image of the Texas wilderness in it.

An extremely linear and uniform poster for the band TOY, with a clear hierarchy of type sizes, I like this but think it could of be even better if it had been done in a screen printing style.

Angular illustration is used to create a stylish end result for this Radiohead poster. The type appears to be an extension of the main illustration, and the whole piece fits together very well, in part due to the extended hands drawing the viewers eye all over the poster.

I like this Death Cab for Cutie poster because of the contrasting image, a teddy bear holding a knife, and what is he going to do with it?

Some posters are far too busy. This Cold War Kids poster isn’t one of them. It makes excellent use of white space, and really draws the viewer’s eye to the band name and illustration.

Bold strips of colour on this The Dirty Sound poster push the retro illustration of the balloon towards you, to create a sense of perspective. Having the text on an angle also creates moveme…

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