Spokeshaver: CD Packaging and Concert Poster illustration

Oct 2012

Spokeshaver was a 4 piece band I was in from 2008 through 2012. I was one of the original founding members and I played bass and synthesizers in the group, in addition to being the band's artistic director and illustrating all of our concert posters. The style I used for most of the work is a color block digital illustration style inspired by the work of Shepard Fairey and the Russian constructivist style of Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg.

The band played over 20 shows throughout the Denver area and released a single 6 song CD EP, of which The Westoword's Jason Heller said: "Over the past few months, the Denver-based group have confounded local audiences with a dose of wiry, sprawling rock that's complex and catchy at the same time." Acclaimed music journalist Tom Murphy says: "These people have the temerity to claim they're really good, but it's not mere bravado: In an era of classic-rock poseurs, Spoke Shaver is the real thing."

CD packaging design for SpokeShaver's CD-EP 'Hlazers" and a flyer for the release show

Album packaging design for the self released 2010 CD-EP ¡HLÄZERZ! was a numbered, limited-edition run of 200 disks. The digipack style outer packaging was manually screen printed by me on .08" chipboard with a 2 color serigraph process on the outside and 2 seperate 4 color process labels for the inside. The registration on the machine I used to print these was not as precise as I would have liked, so I made sure the design itself was very forgiving and had no tight registration to align, and in fact anything that was off up to 1/4" would still look good. The piece was scored and folded and then double sided adhesive was used to create the pocket. The images at the right of this slide were multiple color variations of the poster for the album release party. The imagery was digitally illustrated in the same color block style as the album and previous posters to create brand harmony.

Various digitally illustrated posters for Spokeshaver

Additional Poster illustrations from 2009-2010. The poster at left is digitally illustrated and features an intricate logotype for the bands name paying tribute to the 1972 Neil Young record "Harvest". The posters at right were image traced illustrations of photographs complied and then digitized. They showcase some of my favorite use of color and space in my concert poster designs.