playground love

Illustration: Mike Mills
I'm sure I'm late to this party, but I've only just discovered Mike Mills' web site and spent a little time this morning browsing through his poster, album, t-shirt and book cover art.

His work feels like my childhood and my adulthood and some other strange place I've never been but know I'll recognize when I arrive.

Gotta score some of his films next to see how his aesthetic spills over onto the screen.

MikeMillsWeb.com »

at the movies

[Photo: Hiroshi Sugimoto]

Star Wars
Blade Runner
Aliens
Gremlins
Batman Returns
Darkman
The Little Mermaid
Blazing Saddles
Cape Fear
Young Frankenstein
The Lost Boys
Cocoon
History of the World Part 1
E.T.
The Princess Bride
Empire of the Sun
Arachnophobia
10
Spaceballs
Hook
Flatliners
Mother, Jugs & Speed
City Slickers
Rain Man
The Twilight Zone
The Turning Point
Ironweed
My Favorite Year
The Milagro Beanfield War
Victor Victoria
Mosquito Coast
Pee Wee's Big Adventure

A small selection of movie posters designed by John Alvin, who passed away yesterday.

I miss you already Mr. Alvin, and I didn't even know I knew you.

Many thanks to Vasta for the heads up.

back in black

And, yes, this took a long time.

Armin Vit in Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies, on the design site Under Consideration, commenting on the exercise in which he maps out the dominant color palettes in historically high-grossing films.

His conclusion: The movie posters for the highest-grossing NC-17, R, PG-13 and PG movies (with one exception -- Shrek) are all dominated by the color black, a color that is generally "feared" by design clients as being too dark and gloomy.

Flesh tones came in second. (Flesh is not so feared because baby, sex sells.)

What's missing from this analysis, of course, is the distribution of black across all the other movie posters. Without knowing that, it's dicey to conclude that correlation implies causation.

But it's kinda fun to speculate »