Design concept, style and artist research

"Design is thinking made visual."

Saul Bass

Design concept

Style of website/podcast interface - Rough (possibly hand drawn) graphics mixed with photo images as collage, with very crisp Web 2.0 style icons for navigation/all tasks.

Trying to steer away from standard header-footer-left menu kind of deal, whilst still maintaining good usability.

Also considering:

• Movie posters
• Silhouette
• Big fonts alternating with small fonts
• Strong / pale/ neutral colours

Style research

As our subject of the website and podcast is a combination of a murder/mystery night and radio drama, we started our research within this ‘field’.

The time setting for our website/podcast is the 50’s and 60’s. We search on the internet relevant spy movies of that time and had a look at the poster movies as well, for inspiration.

Our movie list includes:

1. The spy who came who came in from the cold, a 1965 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by John le Carré.

The plot summary:

Alec Leamas, a British spy is sent to East Germany supposedly to defect, but in fact to sow disinformation. As more plot turns appear, Leamas becomes more convinced that his own people see him as just a cog. His struggle back from dehumanization becomes the final focus of the story. (www. imdb.com)

2. James Bond 007: Goldfinger, (1964) represents the third film of the James Bond series. Investigating a gold magnate's gold smuggling, James Bond uncovers a plot to contaminate the Fort Knox gold reserve.

(www. imdb.com)

3. Murder at midnight, was an old-time radio show featuring macabre tales of suspense, often with a supernatural twist. It was produced in New York and was first heard in syndication between September 16, 1946 and September 8, 1947 on radio station WJZ. The show's writers included Robert Newman, Joseph Ruscoll, Max Erlich and William Norwood, and it was directed by Anton M. Leder. The host was Raymond Morgan, who delivered the memorable lines of introduction over Charles Paul's effective organ theme: "Midnight, the witching hour when the night is darkest, our fears the strongest, and our strength at its lowest ebb. Midnight, when the graves gape open and death strikes."

A total of 51 episodes were produced, though the last two were never aired. Ten shows were syndicated and rerun on Mutual in 1950. Though very entertaining at its best, the series' failure can perhaps be attributed to some wildly implausible stories. (www.wikipedia.org)

Artist research

Our group wanted that the one artist that we should focus on should be a graphic designer. The main characteristic of his/her work should be silhouette image, both image and picture and massive font. We found the following artists ‘sharing’

the wanted characteristic: Saul Bass, Abraham Gamse, Armin Hofman.

Our group chose the one artist to be:

Saul Bass (May 8, 1920—April 25, 1996) was a graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences, which is thought of as the best such work ever seen.
During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the text racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of the United Nations building in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that raced together and was pulled apart for Psycho.
Saul Bass designed the 6th AT&T Bell System logo, that at one point achieved a 93 percent recognition rate in the United States. He also designed the AT&T "globe" logo for AT&T after the break up of the Bell System. (www.wikipedia.org)