Rewinding Cassettes: A Tape Miscellany

As many of the places for finding inspiration and discovering visual archives are shapeshifting again, I'm reminded that I should gather more things together and display them here, lest they disappear into some digital ether, along with all my best Myspace angles, birthday reminders (which were fairly handy actually) and NIN-adjacent MSN names. With that in mind, here are a few cassette-themed bits and pieces that I've been perusing recently for design referencing and general time-wasting purposes. Enjoy!

  1. A cassette deck that looks vaguely like a children's toy.   

2. A huge collection of tape inserts.
A collection of card tape inserts, including Memorex, Boots and Agfa brands.A collection of card tape inserts, including Memorex, Boots and Agfa brands.

3. An even bigger, searchable collection of labels and shells to go with them from tapedeck.org.
A collection of plastic tape shells, mostly with red detailing, showcasing a multitude of retro typography.

4. A Japanese cassette archive, via the consistently interesting Present & Correct.
Four Japanese cassettes, which showcase their vintage, geometric-style design.

5. A Tumblr gathering tape-adjacent rarities and oddities (sadly, it doesn't seem to have been updated in a while).
A retro, portable Mayfair tape recorder with a bright yellow box, which features old, 50s-style line illustrations of where it might be used.

6. A vintage Walkman database, which collates prices from old advertisements and lists their original selling price.

7. Boomboxes beyond your wildest imagination.
A disco boombox, photographed in the daytime, where four bulbs are shown in the centre of the speakers. It is bulky and has 80s styling.Four glowing, bright colour bulbs, which continue from the picture above, with smaller, multicoloured lights dotted around. This is the boombox photographed in darkness, looking almost festive.

8. Casio taking an interesting turn below, with the KX-101. Miracles never cease. Quite.

9. Other companies also had a go.

10. Sony's Walkman exhibition, complete with a giant yellow one for snacking around.

11. Soundwave, a tape-themed Decepticon from Transformers, available to buy in 1985 as a useable cassette player, forced to listen your mixtapes forever (or until the batteries ran out).

12. Tape loops and how to make them.

13. Technics having too much fun in their adverts.

14. Walkman creatures by Sticky Monster Lab, found on a great art toy blog which features a few more examples.

15. Walkman Central exists for all your portable listening and cataloguing needs, even twin door versions for home taping away from home. Photo from here.

16. A look at the Sony Walkman logo and the obscure typeface it was based on.

For more of this sort of thing, there is always my newsletter, which combines a lot of niche interests with what I'm up to. 🗞️

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