vintage cassettes

I was old enough to catch the tail end of the cassette era. Making mixtapes was truly a crafty endeavor. Especially if you were too cheap to buy a blank cassette and you taped over an existing retail cassette by scotch-taping over those rectangular holes on the top edge. You could tape over the same tape hundreds of times, chalking up the loss of quality to an endearingly dusty and vintage sound. Even if the tape loop got stuck or unraveled out the bottom, you were resourceful enough to grab a pen, stick it in the spokes and wind it back into place.

Then you'd flex your recording engineering skills by deftly manipulating the record/pause buttons on your "box" to seamlessly transition parts of songs and efficiently fit everything within the 45/60/90 minute limit per side. My early forays into graphic design involved making homemade cassette wrappers. I would trace the blank cassette template onto a medium weight paper, design and illustrate the cover, spine, flap and inside and fold it into the holder.

Ahh, the simple pre-digital age. Here's a flickr gallery of some vintage blank cassette inserts from the 70's & 80's.