Saul Bass [Hardcover]

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300103727
• ISBN-13: 978-0300103724
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,992,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not quite a credit to Mr Bass, November 9, 2011

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saul Bass (Hardcover)

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 movie. 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.

###LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the wait..., November 10, 2011

By 

BLS - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saul Bass (Hardcover)

From the iconic cover image to the unique illustrated footnotes, Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design is a real design treat. Luxuriously paced to give the reader time to enter and enjoy each beautifully printed image. At 1400+ images this could become tiresome and over-saturated but I found it easy to lose myself in each of Bass's designs. Saul's stories and insights are scattered throughout. His voice and his work are presented in a way that would make him proud.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gorgeous Book, December 3, 2011

By 

Devon Miller - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saul Bass (Hardcover)

This book is visually stunning. The text is informative and unpretentious and the collection of Bass' artwork, from film posters to corporate logos, is breathtaking.
The book as a whole provides fascinating insight into the creative process of one of the most influential designers of our time.