It’s quite interesting to see the back and forth between two creative geniuses like Stanley Kubrick and Saul Bass working on the movie poster of The Shining. It wasn’t an easy one for Bass, thanks to Kubrick’s infamous obsessive perfectionism. The poster went through 300 versions before getting final approval.
These are five of the concepts that Bass presented initially—Kubrick’s comments are hand written on the pages:
In these letters Saul Bass presents briefly the concepts to Kubrick. Note Bass’ cool signature. It seems to be made with an inkpad.
Remember that there were 300 more of these. And finally, the final version:
