Studio Brief 2: Initial ideas

IDEA 1 (JIGSAW)

Figure 1

The first idea was to create all of the promotional materials and activities needed for a marketing campaign that was aiming to revive the cassette tape but with the target audience of children. Technology nowadays is expensive, so developing the cassette tape for children would be good because it is affordable. It would be exciting because it could act as a collectable that would be affordable and they could swap amongst themselves. To make this idea successful, the cassette tape would need to be promoted to them as they are not likely to have much knowledge on the product. Fig. 1 shows how iconic people/objects from the 1960/1970s could be displayed in a pop art style as stickers on the cassette tapes and then form a jigsaw. This would be interactive for the children and help to familiarise them with the product and potentially spark a further interest in them. To fulfil the brief, the promotional materials and branding would also ned to be developed for this idea.

IDEA 2 (TYPOGRAPHY)

Figure 2

Figure 2

The second idea aimed to show the exploration of a typographic journey made using only the tape from a cassette. The cassette tape is run on a continuous loop of tape, so a concertina book was the most appropriate book binding method to display this concept. The idea was that one side of the concertina pages would display the unedited experimentations with the tape (fig. 2) and then the other side would have finalised vector images of the individual letters.

IDEA 3 (AUDIO BOOK)

Figure 3

Figure 3

Figure 4

The research tasks highlighted that the audio was the main function of the cassette tape, so taking that feature and applying it to the idea of books and how they can be shortened to audio books is the direction this development process would go. Audio books are listened to for ease and to reduce the time needed for a book to read, so this idea looks at how a novel can ironically be presented to show this feature of an audio book. Fig. 3 explores how the material that the book is made out of can present the concept of a shortened novel. Taking the tape and weaving it to create a textured sheet could be developed as the front and back cover of the book to show the audio function, confirming that the text inside will be a shorter version of the actual novel. Fig. 4 shows another way that this concept could be developed, the tape inside covering the words of the novel, but leaving gaps for a word every couple of pages so that a few short sentences summarising the book are created.