“Comedians say there are only five basic jokes in the world and the same is true of design. After using the Best Picture titles on the Oscar poster, I remembered an Abram Games portrait of Shakespeare composed of titles of all his plays. People pointed out the similarity of this year’s image to the scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where the robot is transformed into a woman by circles of static electricity. I knew the scene, of course, but the similarity was accidental. At this years AGI congress, everyone was invited to come up with a four-letter graphic, and I proposed ‘dead’ with the last ‘d’ topped, only to discover that had also been done before.”
— Arnold Schwartzman (via Graphis)