Characters on souvenirs have a '60s feeling

By JENNIFER ROGERS
Staff Writer

Although Joe Miller has worked on projects for festivals in his hometown of Louisville in the past, he says that designing the shirts, pins, and poster for this year's Brass Band Festival was a different kind of challenge.

"That gives us a chance to step out of our comfort zone," says Miller, who is the director of graphic arts for Host Communications in Lexington. Miller says most of his work at Host is spent on athletic events.

This year, Miller says Host donated a large portion of its time to the festival and is now a sponsor of the event, which the company took on after visiting Centre College's Norton Center for the Arts.

After talking with festival representatives, who said they wanted something whimsical and artsy, Miller says designing the shirts, which feature three colorful tuba, saxophone and cornet players, was easy. The shirts are available in white, purple and key lime.

"They talked to us about creating whimsical characters that represented the history and fun of the Brass Band Festival," Miller said.

After some experimentation, Miller's design took on a 1960s pop art feel.

"It just started to look to us like a cross between `Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club' and `Yellow Submarine,'" Miller said.

Although they began as pencil sketches and took only a few hours to be completed, the three band players Miller designed are stored as computer images, which allows more flexibility and less limitation, Miller said.

"We can run them the size of a postage stamp or the size of a billboard," Miller said.

This year's souvenir selection also includes three pins, each featuring one of the T-shirt's band players on a black background.

The poster, also designed by Host, has a purposefully different design from the shirts and pins, Miller said. The poster shows images from the festival reflected in the bell of a tuba, set against the background of an American flag.

"It has some continuity with previous posters, but it's something that they haven't done before," Miller said. Miller said that one goal was to make the poster more traditional, looking like it was part of a collection.

"It's going to be a tremendous amount of digital retouching," Miller said. "We never could've dreamed of doing this five years ago." Most of the work on the posters has been done on computer design programs.

Miller, who says he had never been to Danville until he came to the Norton Center, estimates that up to 80 hours of production will be spent on the poster.

Miller, who has been with Host for five years, said that working on the festival souvenirs has been fun, and he plans to make his first visit to the festival with his children this year.

The T-shirts cost $13 for children and $16 for adult sizes S-XL; $17 for 2XL; and $18 for 3XL. The pins are $5 each and can be purchased as a set of three for $13. Posters are $10. Souvenir CD recordings of highlights of several years' festival are $15 and are available for every year since 1996.