Bruce Licher is a musician, artist, and designer who founded Independent Project Press after learning the art of letterpress printing at the Women's Graphic Center in downtown Los Angeles at the beginning of 1982. His initial projects centered around creating album covers, postcards, and promotional stamps for his band Savage Republic. It didn’t take long before he was producing work for other Los Angeles underground music groups, along with a growing number of clients in the Los Angeles design community.
Licher was nominated twice for a Grammy Award for his album packaging, and has been credited with starting the trend in letterpress-printed CD and record packaging using industrial-style chipboard. His graphic design and letterpress work has been featured in two major design exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City, and has also been exhibited in California, Arizona, and Paris, France. After 17 years living and working in Sedona, Arizona, Licher and his wife, the artist Karen Nielsen Licher, have relocated Independent Project Press to the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop, California.
Intrigued by the conceptual possibilities of creating a series of faux-postal stamp designs for his musical group, he designed and printed postcards, stamps, and stamped envelopes picturing the flag and logo he had created for the band. In the process he crafted an aesthetic mystique unlike any other. Bruce’s concept extended to using these Savage Republic “postal” creations on all of the mail sent out from his Independent Project Records label during the 1980’s (alongside the appropriate amount of valid U.S. postage, of course), along with creating special stamps commemorating Savage Republic’s tours.
