Stanley ‘Mouse’ Miller acquired his nickname from the mouse illustrations that he doodled all over his notebooks. After a spell at Detroit's School for the Society of Arts and Crafts (which he found uninspiring) Miller set up his own business, Mouse Studios, creating posters and T-shirts. Mouse moved to San Francisco in 1964, and meeting the artists associated with Family Dog, he began to design promotional posters for their events at the Avalon Ballroom with his friend Alton Kelley. The two worked closely together, with Mouse producing imagery around Kelley’s ideas, experimenting with visual styles, composition and lettering.

This poster combines extreme contrasting shades of saturated colour, florescent shades of orange and pink with strong violet-blue. Placing complementary colours, such as red and green or violet and orange, and even saturated shades of similar colours such as orange and pink, create a vibrating effect on the surface of the retina, disrupting the viewer’s ability to comprehend elements of the poster. Here, the use of colour makes the lettering difficult to decipher, meaning that the viewer would need to spend more time examining the poster to perceive the message. As previously discussed, this idea of a ‘slow poster’ flies in the face of accepted design practice, (where the message was intended to be transparent) but was designed to appeal to a specific element of contemporary west-coast youth culture.