ABC Movie of the Week

"Sophisticated graphics for television may have originated at CBS in New York under Lou Dorfsman and in L.A. with Saul Bass, but Harry Marks took their ideas and ran with them. A love of typography struck when he was a 15-year-old apprentice at Oxford University Press; Marks then became interested in music and film. This vibrant young gun with an expansive vision of what graphics for the screen could be made his way to Los Angeles and, in 1966, landed a job at ABC just as its ratings skyrocketed and its graphics started earning national attention. Only a couple of years later, when Trumbull shared his special-effects outtakes from Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey', Marks’s imaginative prowess really took flight. His mind blown by the possibilities of how he might translate this 'graphic madness into something legible,' Marks joined with Trumbull to use experimental techniques to create abstracted yet legible dimensional typography and a new sense of space and dynamic movement for the small screen. These e≈orts led to the legendary graphics for ABC’s 'Movie of the Week'. But that was only the beginning. Marks’s work was duly credited to a host of collaborators who along the way established the technical and artistic base from which his ideas sprang. This recognition of the combined talents of musicians, artists, scientists, and engineers led Marks to conceive of a conference to gather all the diverse, exceptional, inventive people who often worked on the same projects but didn’t know each other. In 1984, in Monterey, California, Marks and partner Richard Saul Wurman organized the first Technology Entertainment and Design conference, now a regular event known the world over as TED."—Louise Sandhaus, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design 1936-1986, p 172