makeshift

Recently I found myself spending time, probably more than I should, browsing tapedeck.org. The site, it's creators claim, is "built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette". It catalogues all common tape designs by brand, playing time, and quality.

It brought back pangs of emotion remembering walks to the music store and Woolworths. Making mix-tapes on my dads tape-to-tape recorder. There were a lot of different blank cassette tapes to choose from. As someone who suffered(?) with a car that only played tapes up until fairly recently I always used to find myself buying new cassettes based, not on their playback quality, or length, but on their graphic design. They remind me a little of the spatial challenges faced by designers of adverts on the side of buses. Surely the best being the early Guinness adverts by Benson’s drawn by John Gilroy? One that springs to mind invited you to turn the bus on its side to read the slogan ‘Guinness for Strength’.

The cassette tape was born in the 1960s by the dutch electronics company Philips as a portable alternative to the large vinyl formats. Having not been patented the cassette tape design was quickly copied by many manufacturers. Cassettes boomed and hit their peak during the mid 1980s when they accounting for more than half of the worlds total music sales.

Also check out the great cassette case graphics at www.polaralert.com and the nifty cassette wallets at the designboom shop.

I've added a few of my own collection above.