Type Tuesday: PSYCHO

This year marked the 50th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock's ground breaking film, Psycho. This film is credited with inventing the genre of the modern horror film. As most of us who attended design school know, the opening title was designed by the Master of Title Design, Saul  Bass (1920-1996). This is my opportunity to pay respect to him. Over the next few weeks, I'll be looking at Mr. Bass's work on such films as Psycho, and his contributions to Graphic Design over all. For those of you who may have never heard of Saul Bass, he has been credited with reinventing, and turning film title sequence into an art form. As a student at the famous Art Students League and at Brooklyn College,  he came under the influence of Gyorgy Kepes and that of Russian Constructivist typography and Bauhaus design theory.[1] Bass however was able to take those principles of thought and mold it to his own design sense and style of visual story telling, adding a certain avant-garde feel, as is evident in the work that I will be highlighting in my tribute to him. His corporate work has included corporate identities for United Airlines, AT&T, Minolta, Bell Telephone System and Warner Communications. He also designed the poster for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, and for the Academy Awards celebrations from 1991-1996 [1]

Today's pick, Psycho, showcases his ability to use the simplicity of horizontal and vertical bars cutting and slicing across the screen.

 

The opening set to the score by Bernard Herrmann, sets an unnerving feeling for the viewer. The bars cut the the type used for the credits at the opening of the film.

The title PSYCHO it's self fractures, foreshadowing the mental state of Norman Bates.
(video link at the end of post)






Not only was Bass responsible for the title design of the film, he is also credited as Pictorial Consultant, and storyboarded the famous shower scene and stated in 1973 that he was invited by Hitchcock to direct it. This is a claim that is definitively contradicted by both Janet Leigh and Assistant Director Hilton Green. Janet Leigh points out in Stephen Rebello's book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Hitchcock met with Bass and gave him detailed instructions concerning the scene, from which Bass then developed storyboard pictorial ideas [2] I have included the storyboard [3] for fun, so let the "Norman Debates" continue. (sorry, I couldn't pass up that chance for a cheesy pun!)

"My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and
the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story
in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning
the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would
already have an emotional resonance with it"
—Saul Bass

Link for PSYCHO Title Sequence

References
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1. RIT Graphic Design Archive:  http://library.rit.edu/gda/designer/saul-bass
2. wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bass
3. splinder.com: http://and.splinder.com/tag/saul+bass