Google Saul Bass Doodle Celebrates Movie Title Designer

Google has rolled out another of its Doodles, this time celebrating the birthday of famed graphic designer Saul Bass, known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock and others. Bass, who died in 1996, grew famous for his striking title sequences for movies from Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese, as well as work on posters and logos.

As you might expect when the subject is a famed designer, Google's Doodle team has gone all out in creating an animation that does Bass justice. The 1:21 clip runs through various different styles of Bass' work, including an homage to 1958's Vertigo and 1960's Psycho.

There are also nods to West Side Story and The Shining, all set to Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance" as the soundtrack. Unlike some of Google's other recent Doodles, the clip isn't interactive, instead being a rather more straightforward video (that you can watch below).

Bass managed to segue a job designing movie posters in the 1940s into a role in the title design division, creating the sequence for 1954's Carmen Jones after his art caught the eye of Otto Preminger. His distinctive typographical animation went on to encapsulate the taut Hitchcock thrillers, for which he created titles for several movies.