Quotes from Saul Bass

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

I've watched Spike Lee's career with interest, and he seemed to be striving for an original and moral point of view.

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.

The goal, and the ultimate achievement, is to make people feel as well as think.

I think that the sun*like rainbow growing out of the hand is open to many alternate positive interpretations. One may say it's the hand of the United Way bringing hope to people. But it helps signal that United Way is vibrant, exciting, colorful, positive and changing.

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.

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.

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

Design is thinking made visual.

Logos are a graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.

Failure is built into creativity... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure.

You know, whenever I was presented with a challenge that brought up feelings of fear or self-doubt, I almost always said, 'Yes'.

Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.