I’ve been obsessed with those 3″ mini CDR’s ever since I realized you could buy them in bulk. Unfortunately, the sleeves that are available for CD’s of this size all have some sort of aesthetic imperfection that drives me completely nuts. This is because I’m insane. As part of my Christmas 2004 “ridiculous mix CD” campaign, I decided to solve this problem. I began the project with three goals in mind:
- I would “borrow” this idea from craftster: a year of mix CD’s.
- I would use mini CDR’s
- I would devise a mini CD sleeve that met my ridiculous standards
I’m pleased to report that I accomplished all three.
The first thing I did was tackle the sleeve design. I never realized how much work went into designing a simple envelope, but I went through a whole range of prototypes before finally hitting on a design that worked for me. Some of the rejects are pictured below.
Since I’m such a nice guy, I’ve included a .pdf of the sloppy sketch I used for a template, so you can make your own Kempa-approved aesthetically perfect mini CD sleeves. Just click the image below. I transferred the template to thick cardstock for extra durability. As you can see from the photo below, the finished product is delicious looking.
Next, I constructed a special box to hold a year’s worth of sleeved mini CD’s using the duct-tape / cardboard method I outlined here. I covered the result in brown Kraft paper, and added an inter-office envelope-ish closure mechanism. Finally, I spent a kabillion years making 12 mix CD’s. The final product is below.
