Artist Saul Bass is renowned for his movie titles, credit sequences, and trailers, all done in minimalist style that made them artworks able to stand on their own. He also designed posters for movies, 37 of them in all.
Directors were floored by Bass’ ability to distill a story down to its bare essence — how his thick black lines and bold swatches of color seduced and focused a viewer’s attention where other posters would simply try to overwhelm it — and legendary auteurs like Otto Preminger would fight the studios to protect Bass’ creative freedom. His style was so striking and influential that it was widely copied in his own time, and many of the posters that are still attributed to Bass were actually created by imitators (e.g. “West Side Story” and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World”).
You can see all 37 of those Saul Bass's movie posters, from Champion in 1949 to Schindler's List in 1993, at IndieWire. -via Metafilter