Style combination · Contrasts
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics × Polish Poster School
The Polish film poster also distorts the body into a metaphor, but paints it in loose brushwork with painterly texture; Bass cuts it into hard, flat paper shapes on an empty ground.
Mix them and make something Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Polish Poster School
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What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Polish Poster School
- Type from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
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Polish Poster School avoids grotesque & neo-grotesque: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
- Colour from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Form from Polish Poster School
- Composition from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Surface from Polish Poster School
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
Wow
Londrina Solid; Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics used Ragged, paper-cut display lettering with a 'subtly jagged imprecision', drawn and cut in the studio and by freelance letterers and Plain sans-serif credits moved as graphic elements
Text · Polish Poster School
A painterly, metaphorical poster culture that flourished in communist Poland, chiefly for film, theatre, opera and circus. Working for state publishers, free of commercial pressure but under censorship, designers such as Henryk Tomaszewski, Jan Lenica and Roman Cieślewicz replaced star photographs with a single witty or unsettling visual idea, painted or collaged by hand and lettered in the artist's own handwriting.
Archivo; Polish Poster School used Henryk Tomaszewski's casual handwritten capitals and Brush- and crayon-drawn title lettering
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics, with a counter-accent from Polish Poster School. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Polish Poster School
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#111111ground · 36% -
#efe9dcink · 14% -
#e0461faccent · 18% -
#e8a92caccent · 14% -
#2d4f8eaccent · 10% -
#9a9894accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #111111;
--ink: #efe9dc;
--accent-1: #e0461f;
--accent-2: #e8a92c;
--accent-3: #2d4f8e;
--accent-4: #9a9894;
--font-display: "Londrina Solid", cursive;
--font-text: "Archivo", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics: The posters, title sequences, film scores and corporate marks are in copyright, and several logos are still registered trademarks: borrow the method (one cut symbol, a flat ground, bars that assemble in time), never a specific arm, spiral, dissected body or logo, and do not present new work as a Bass design. Credit Elaine Bass and the letterers where the record names them rather than attributing everything to Saul.
04
The two styles
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More combinations
With Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · ICAIC's film posters also read a film through one silhouette or pun, but in saturated, clashing screenprint colour for a revolutionary public; Bass keeps to one or two flat colours and black, and the symbol's real home is the moving title.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Contrasts · Hillmann's posters also refuse star portraits and reduce a film to one sign, but they are static sheets set in grotesque type that often find the sign in a grainy photograph; Bass draws and cuts the sign by hand and builds it as a moving title before it becomes a poster.
- UPA & Cartoon Modern Pairs well · Its Los Angeles neighbour in flat, modern animation: borrow UPA's caricatured cast when a title needs characters, and keep Bass's single symbol and bars when it needs suspense.
- Corporate Identity Modernism Pairs well · Bass carried the same reduction to one symbol into the Bell System, Continental and United logos; pair the two when a brand needs an animated mark rather than a static emblem.
- American Mid-Century Modernism Pairs well · Its print parent, which already counts Bass among its makers: take Rand's or Lustig's cut-paper wit on the page, and the Bass branch when the single idea has to move, assemble in time and set a mood before a story begins.
With Polish Poster School
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Painterly ambiguity versus objective grid and photography; borrow one hand-painted image to warm a Swiss-style cultural series.
- Socialist Realist Propaganda Poster Contrasts · The school defined itself against official heroic realism; use the pairing to show metaphor outperforming literal propaganda.
- Iranian Modernist Graphic Design Pairs well · Iranian designers absorbed the Polish metaphor poster; combine one surreal image with calligraphic lettering for cultural posters.
- Push Pin Style Pairs well · Both prize the illustrator-designer's hand and wit; pair Polish metaphor with Push Pin lettering for theatrical, idea-led posters.
- Polish Cold War Neon (PRL Neonisation) Pairs well · Some of the same artists drew posters and neons; take the poster's single witty idea and hand-drawn title and translate it into one line of light for a night version of a campaign.
- Polish Information Picture Book (Dwie Siostry) Contrasts · The poster designer and teacher Henryk Tomaszewski is credited with a role in the revival, but the poster school puts one painted, metaphorical image on a poster, while the picture books refuse paint and fill a spread with a hundred small labelled facts. Choose between a single idea that provokes and a dense page that informs.
- Turkish Modernist Poster & Graphic Design Contrasts · The same conceptual-poster network: Turkish designers showed at the Warsaw Poster Biennale from 1966 and Ertel's posters entered the Wilanów archive in 1968. The Polish school paints, collages and distorts its single idea; the Turkish posters cut it into flat shapes in two or three clean inks. Choose Warsaw for unease, Istanbul for a crisp visual pun.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Contrasts · Its contemporary in art-film posters: the Polish school paints the metaphor and letters the title by hand in loose brushwork; take the Kassel route when the same single idea should come from a cropped photograph or a hard silhouette with set grotesque type.