Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley was a British Art Nouveau artist whose work is characterized by large swaths of black contrasted with large swaths of white, and areas of intense detail contrasted with areas that are blank. The imagery is generally pretty dark, and can get grotesque and erotic. 

I dig it because he's influenced a lot of my favorite artists (who in turn influence my workand aesthetic). And while I like the majority of Art Nouveau as it is pretty, elegant, graceful, lots of swooping, curving lines, etc, really dark Art Nouveau is extremely refreshing. 

Saul Bass

"Symbolize and Summarize"

Saul Bass is the design genius behind movie posters and title sequences for such famous film makers as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorcese. He came up with THE iconic corporate logos for AT&T, United Airlines, United Way, Girl Scouts, Quaker, and also was an academy award winning film maker.

This guy seems like the uber-genius of design. The idea behind a lot of his work is simple, and is probably a popular exercise these days: distill down the idea of an entire movie/album/company into one image. The crazy thing though is his images, for being so simple, not only convey the idea of a movie so poetically, but the images are stark and arresting.