SAUL BASS

When a well-known creative person such as me is perceived to have created a knockoff of my own previous work, such a perception is a mortal blow to my reputation as a creative person.

We are truly bombarded by images. To break through and be observed, let alone focused on, you have to have impact and power.

When I provided the disembodied arm as the logo for 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' it was the first time an advertising-publicity campaign was based on a single symbol. Until then film companies used a variety of symbols and photographs to cover all bets. The concept of using one logo was mine and Otto Preminger's.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable.

Corporate identity deals with how a company is perceived. When you're working for a company, you try to determine what the optimum perception of them should be and develop a set of objectives that often take the form of reinforcing what's there that's perceived to be desirable and finding a way of dealing with misperceptions.

A new 'look' for any organization cannot be a papier-mache cover, tacked on with Scotch tape under the heading of 'beautification.' It has to be based on a probing examination of the company and the people who work for it. As a result, the eventual external visual design becomes the graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.

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.

In 'Age of Innocence,' the opening flowers, that's a metaphor for the film, the Victorian veneer with the malevolence beneath it. We attempted to show that with flowers that start as sweet and then slowly become malevolent.

This is my real concern: to give each film a unique individuality.

The very first pieces of film that I did were really graphic designs translated to film. Graphic designs that moved. That was a very new notion.

There's nothing worse that you can do than create an aura about a company that's not substantiated by fact. It's not only ineffective but actually harmful to the company. You can create an image or whatever, but it won't stick.

Somewhere down the line, I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic - or live action - image which seemed to me central to the notion of film. And then a whole new world opened to me.

In 'Cape Fear,' all that water and the reflections and these threatening and submerged images in the water - that signals the awfulness that is to come. We're very good at awfulness. No, really, we do do some sweet titles, too.

In the course of our daily lives, we're bombarded with a barrage of visual messages, some blatantly aggressive, some subtle. The trick is to find a way to break through without adding to the clutter and the ugliness. We have to be responsible about that.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

At one point it occurred to me that the title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue.

The only way I work as a designer is to consciously avoid specialisation.

If it's simple simple, it's boring. We try for the idea that is so simple that it will make you think and rethink.

Interestingly enough, the storyboard... that I did for 'Psycho' went precisely as I laid it up, and there was no change on that. And frankly, I myself at that point didn't even really understand the impact that some of these things would have.

A corporation trademark represents a total program for a company. A good symbol will implement its products. Normally such a symbol will be around for an indefinite future 10, 20, 30 years or more.

When Braniff abandoned stripes, they wound up with a flying jelly bean and that's not a good feeling for passengers.

The average individual lives in a high impact, complex, visual environment.

If the titles are treated in a straightforward way, nobody is really interested. The theory is that in those two or three minutes, you can set the tone for the films, so that when the story begins the audience hits the ground running.

Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.