Cool Artists

Jason Munn

Jason Munn is originally from Wisconsin but now calls Oakland, California home. Arising from a love of independent music, design, and making for the sake of making, his posters soon became a fixture in the

local independent music scene.

He started The Small Stakes in the fall of 2003, and it has since unfolded into a successful independent design studio, producing nationally and internationally commissioned work in a range of print materials, including book covers, album packaging, T-shirt designs, screen-printed posters, and illustrations.

Jason's work has appeared in Print, Communication Arts, Step Inside Design, Computer Arts Projects, ReadyMade, and Creative Review. His work has also been featured in numerous exhibits and is part of the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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Saul Bass

(May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was an American graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences.

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 (1960).

Saul Bass designed the sixth AT&T Bell System logo. He also designed AT&T's "globe" logo after the breakup of the Bell System. Bass also designed Continental Airlines' 1968 "jetstream" logo which became the most recognized airline industry logo of the 1970s.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

Regarded as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Henri Cartier-Bresson was a shy Frenchman who elevated "snap shooting" to the level of a refined and disciplined art. His sharp-shooter’s ability to catch "the decisive moment," his precise eye for design, his self-effacing methods of work, and his literate comments about the theory and practice of photography made him a legendary figure among contemporary photojournalists.

His work and his approach have exercised a profound and far-reaching influence. His pictures and picture essays have been published in most of the world’s major magazines during three decades, and Cartier-Bresson prints have hung in the leading art museums of the United States and Europe (his monumental ‘The Decisive Moment’ show being the first photographic exhibit ever to be displayed in the halls of the Louvre). In the practical world of picture marketing, Cartier-Bresson left his imprint as well: he was one of the founders and a former president of Magnum, a cooperative picture agency of New York and Paris.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908, in Chanteloupe, France, of prosperous middle-class parents. He owned a Box Brownie as a boy, using it for taking holiday snapshots, and later experimented with a 3 X 4 view camera. But he was also interested in painting and studied for two years in a Paris studio. This early training in art helped develop the subtle and sensitive eye for composition, which was one of his greatest assets as a photographer.

In 1931, at the age of 22, Cartier-Bresson spent a year as a hunter in the West African bush. Catching a case of backwater fever, he returned to France to convalesce. It was at this time, in Marseille, that he first truly discovered photography. He obtained a Leica and began snapping a few pictures with it. It was a pivotal experience. A new world, a new kind of seeing, spontaneous and unpredictable, opened up to him through the narrow rectangle of the 35 mm viewfinder. His imagination caught fire. He recalls how he excitedly "prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life, to preserve life in the act of living."

Thus began one of the most fruitful collaborations between man and machine in the history of photography. He remained devoted to the 35 mm camera throughout his career. The speed, mobility, the large number of exposures per loading, and, above all, the unobtrusiveness of the little camera perfectly fitted his shy, quicksilver personality. Before long he was handling its controls as automatically as an expert racing driver shifts gears. The camera itself, in his own famous phrase, became an "extension of the eye".When World War II erupted, Cartier-Bresson served briefly in the French Army and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of France. After two unsuccessful tries, he escaped from the camp where he was held as a prisoner of war, and worked with the underground until the war’s end.Resuming his interrupted career as a photojournalist, he helped form the Magnum picture agency in 1947. Assignments for major magazines would take him on global travels, across Europe and the United States, to India, Russia and China. Many books of Cartier-Bresson photographs were published in the 50’s and 60’s, the most famous being ‘The Decisive Moment’ (1952). A major milestone in his career was a massive, 400-print retrospective exhibition, which toured the United States in 1960.

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Wes Anderson Born May 1^st, 1969 in Houston, Texas. He started working on films with actor/writer Owen Wilson when the two met as students at the University of Texas in the early 1990s. Out of college, the two wrote, and Anderson directed, the comedy Bottle Rockets (first as a short, then as a feature in 1996), a quirky comedy that found a limited but enthusiastic audience. Anderson and Owen then reached a wider audience with Rushmore (1998, with Bill Murray) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, with Gwyneth Paltrow). Anderson has proven himself as a filmmaker with a distinctive style, earning a not-quite-cult following and appreciative nods from most critics. Anderson's movies are neither epic nor flashy; he creates characters and tells stories of relationships with understated humor, earning him comparisons to filmmaker Woody Allen. His other films include The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and a stop-motion animated feature based on Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, called Fantastic Mr. Fox, starring the voices of George Clooney and Meryl Streep.

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Alexey Brodovitch Pioneering graphic designer and painter Alexey Brodovitch was born in Russia and came to the United States in 1930 via Paris during the Bolshevik Revolution. From 1934 to 1958, he was the art director of Harper's Bazaar and collaborated with photographers including Richard Avedon and Andre Kertesz.

Brodovitch also was a photographer, and taught both photography and graphic design in New York at the Design Lab. He was one of the first persons in America to teach graphic design as a discipline and to treat the subject professionally.

He is credited with changing the nature of graphic design because of his asymmetrical layouts with white spacing and his exposure of Americans to avant-garde Europeans artists and photographers including Salvadore Dali, Man-Ray, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. In a 2005 auction at Christie's auction house a new record was set when "La blanchisseuse", an early painting of a young laundress, sold for $22.4 million U.S.

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