I Want the One I Can’t Have
Vertigo: a film poster by Saul Bass. A masterclass in graphic communication
Film director Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made: a story of morbid, doomed romance and a degenerate, illusory love.
The story of the film’s poster designer, Saul Bass, is an equally thrilling one. In the late 1950s, he revolutionised the graphic presentation of the feature film through his treatment of the title sequence and the poster. Bass is critically commended for the ideas, approach and craft inherent in his work.
The original American poster for Vertigo is designed using two colours – red and black. It was printed on an American standard one-sheet measuring 27 × 41 inches (before later standardisation).
A vibrant, solid red covers the majority of the poster. It uses small, single-line drawings of a man and a woman caught in a white spirograph-like vortex. The man is filled in with black; the woman, by contrast, is left white. Both are centred in a vortex, cut out against the red. The film’s title is hand-drawn in black capital letters and stretches over half the width of the poster. It is ranged left and sits at the bottom. Hitchcock’s name sits below those of his two stars, James Stewart and Kim Novak. They occupy a similar width to the title but sit at the top.
Bass’s skill is in his storytelling through graphic marks. He makes us look again at the familiar. His design work raises complex ideas through simplistic, clichéd symbols and signs. In the Vertigo poster, this simplicity is found in the use of a limited colour palette, the hand-drawn typeface, and the line-drawn central characters and spiral.
While the oversized spiral graphic device certainly illustrates the affliction of vertigo, the designer’s true genius is in his thoughtful employment and placement of each constituent part of the poster to express the film’s noir themes: obsession, betrayal and fatalism.
The mass of red that forms the background warns us of the film’s dangerous backdrop. The shadowy, black, filled-in male figure arresting the fragile, white, line-drawn female at the centre of the vortex highlights the unequal and fatalistic nature of the relationship while remaining somewhat ambiguous. The purposefully naïve, hand-drawn typeface suggests the uneven, manipulative and peculiar nature of the film’s themes.
Bass’s canonical status is earned from the overall composition of his work, evident in the Vertigo poster in particular, and in the sense of proportion and balance he achieves. This is perfectly demonstrated by his lettering. The childlike, etched and scratched character of the capitalised letterforms obscures a masterclass in typographic harmony. Neither the cap height nor x-height are consistent, yet Bass nevertheless offers a delicate balancing act between individual characters and words that creates an anatomically perfect typographic cluster.
A full-size facsimile of the poster has hung in my living room for over 20 years. I still find elements to marvel at each time I look at it for any length of time – in particular, the hand-drawn letterforms.
As Hitchcock said of the poster, ‘Isn’t it a fascinating design? One could study it forever.’ Quite!
Alex Cameron, September 2026
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I Want the One I Can’t Have
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