'A little piece of Spokane history': Meet the woman who designed the 50th Bloomsday finisher shirt

May 7-Minutes before the starting gun fired to mark the 50th Bloomsday, Lauren Miller told her father the biggest secret she has ever been forced to keep: "I won it!"

Given that the race hadn't even started, her father, Matthew Miller, was understandably confused.

"Won what?" he asked.

That's when she told him that her design had been selected by the Lilac Bloomsday Association to be this year's finisher T-shirt. It is a secret she had to keep for about six months.

One of six concepts she drew up, the winning design showcases the Monroe Street Bridge, spotted with dashes of teal and encased in a vibrant yellow background.

The word "2026" is suspended above the top of the bridge, while below the bridge is a reflection, or what's known as an ambigram, and "1977" written upside down. The retro colors of teal and yellow and the ambigram are meant to pay homage to the original Bloomsday, which is also the first one her father participated in.

"I wanted to make some kind of allusion to the past," Lauren Miller said. "Honestly, the colors are my favorite part. I really like doing the bright designs because I went to school when stark, muted tones were the vibe and all the cool minimalism. And now I'm like, 'I just want as much bright color as I can get.' "

Lauren Miller, 35, remembered stories from her father about how the 1,200 runners who were part of the initial Bloomsday gathered on the concrete steps along the Spokane River, just outside of where the convention center is now located, before the race began. The reflection of the runners in the water served as an inspiration years later when she started dreaming up designs for the 50th Bloomsday.

She did not draw up any rough drafts for the six designs she created. She simply "entered flow state" and pumped out six designs in a single afternoon. One of those happened to be the winner. The year prior, she entered about five designs, but didn't win.

Matthew Miller said he has competed in every single Bloomsday except two, making him an almost-Perennial. He missed one about 11 years ago when he had his hip replaced, and the other instance was in 1980 because he slept in when a Bloomsday party the night before took its toll the following morning.

When Lauren Miller was in fourth or fifth grade, she began competing in Bloomsday. Her father described her as a "little machine" and remembers how he had to pat her on the head occasionally to get her to slow down and keep his pace. Since her first Bloomsday, Lauren Miller estimates she has done the run between 15 and 20 times.

A 2014 graduate of Eastern Washington University, Lauren Miller majored in communication and minored in design. She said she expected to actually use her degree out of college and build a career of some sort for herself. Life had other plans.

For the first five years out of college, she worked at a bank, and for the past five years, she's worked part-time at a bakery on the South Hill. She rarely uses her degree.

"I actually mostly just do freelance design and stuff for my family and my Dungeons and Dragons game," Lauren Miller said. "It's sort of my eternal problem that I get really interested in something, and then I drop it and go to another thing. I really like design, but I work part time at a bakery in South Hill, and then otherwise, I just kind of live a good life."

Lauren Miller said she's thankful that her husband, whom she met during a Dungeons and Dragons game, has a full-time job as an IT specialist at WSU. As the storyteller for her Dungeon and Dragons game, also known as the Dungeon Master, it's Lauren Miller's job to illustrate the world in which the role-playing game is set by creating in-world posters, caricatures and more. She does this by creating designs in the Adobe Illustrator app on her computer, often times in her kitchen, which is the exact same way she dreamed up this year's winning shirt design.

She has lived her entire life in Spokane and said she has no plans on leaving any time soon.

"Not to quote the town slogan, but 'Near nature, near perfect,'" she said, when asked why she loves Spokane as much as she does.

Because Miller was born in 1990, she said she's watched as Spokane morphed from a big town into a city. Along the way, she said Spokane has experienced some growing pains, but is still a place filled with "a lot of good."

What surprised her the most about this year's shirt competition was how few people submitted designs. Many of her friends asked her how she was selected to design the shirt without realizing there was a competition with a prize of $1,000.

Bethany Lueck, the spokesperson for the Lilac Bloomsday Association, said they had over 300 submissions for the finisher shirt this year. Some artists submitted as few as one, while others inputted as many as 10.

While Lauren Miller's already scheming up designs for future Bloomsday shirts, she wants more artists in Spokane to submit their work for two reasons: It's fun and, well, "Why not?"

"I just was like, 'Well, it would be super cool to someday have a little piece of Spokane history,'" Lauren Miller said. "I'm sure everyone will forget that it was me, but I won't. I'll know."

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