Cassette Design Projects

Upon beginning my clothing brand alongside my friends, I was able to meet and connect with multiple different artists in the New York area, a lot of those being local musicians or bands that I had connected with through friends or other avenues. I began to do commission work for many of these musicians, culminating in a friend reaching out for assistance in designing cassette art for his band's latest album. I had never considered creating cassettes since even at a young age they had begun to go out of style, but, he reassured me that the distribution of cassettes were making a comeback in certain scenes and wished to capitalize on it by utilizing my artistic output. My initial difficulties in my first cassette-centered project were how to best use my abilities to enhance the physical, multi-layered, medium that was cassette art, requiring me to design multiple panels, sides, logos and recognizable symbols to best ensure a complete package with my work. I worked alongside my friend and a local cassette printer and created my first cassette, one focusing on nature, religion, and recognizable figures used to bring interest into the package and the music it contained.
As the first cassette I worked on grew to be a success, selling well in the small local indie rock scene, a close friend, looking to begin their journey into electronic music, requested my assistance in a cassette design of their own, looking to create a design intrinsically linked to video game iconography, specifically the Half-Life Series. This was a series I had enjoyed and delved into as a teenager so I was familiar with the property and, began researching and conceiving the best way to design. I was instructed to create a design that was both humorous, with its callbacks and use of the source material, as well as something strange and offputting, drawing from the unnatural feel and look of the game series. Initially, the specifics of only using symbols and designs from a preexisting intellectual property proved to be difficult, with time I embraced the ironic spin I was able to do on the design and created something I believe can be exciting, mysterious, funny and that elevates the music within.
My final design came when I was contacted by a college radio show, hosted and directed by a local DJ and manager, with whom I was an acquaintance, asking for assistance with the design of his brand's first venture into physical music distribution, as well as assistance in helping to define and design the brand's identity. I immediately accepted and began workshopping with him to create a brand identity that successfully showcased the soul of what the brand stood for. With my third cassette, I focused solely on emotion, identity, and loneliness, with the project centering around the concept of floating through space alone. My difficulties this time came in the form of how to make the viewer feel the central message with a minimalistic approach to the design. To this point, I believe I succeeded in keeping the core message alive through the simple but, layered designs I created, this time working closely with the cassette designer I had previously worked with from a distance, now working alongside to use the medium to its highest potential. The design was a success and the radio show brought me on board to do occasional designs, event-planning, and lead the next several cassettes production, allowing me to continue to see my designs and concepts through to their fruition.