Turning My Cardboard CDs into Jewel Cases

Over the last couple years, I've been collecting CDs of albums that I like here and there (more there than here), and one of my biggest pet peeves when it came to displaying all of them was the awful inconsistency and quality of the paper/cardboard sleeves (not to be confused with digipaks). They accumulate damage so easily, get squished by the Jewel standard cases, and are usually a pain to actually dig the contents out of (making it easy to smudge or scratch the disk). So to address this issue, I decided to take all of these cardboard cases and turn them into standard jewel cases!

There was a lot of deliberation about sizes, which was a bit nerve-racking because it was a lot of time between design and print, but I can save anyone else who is interested the measurements / a template to save time!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F8mjk6VolKtayys1I5MOUE9DZbvUU7hE/view?usp=sharing

I used Inkscape, a FOSS Illustrator alternative to make everything for this project. I had initially thought that I would be able to just find images and paste them, but I actually had to make a lot of assets myself (which was time consuming, but fun) because there weren't many good resources for the insides of these CDs that could just be pasted in. 

The first decision that had to be made was whether I wanted to have a case that was entirely clear, allowing for more creativity and freedom in design or a case with a black spine / cartridge. This usually came down to two factors: the design of the artwork itself (would it look strange having extra artwork to the side, or would a black spine look weird?) and the ability to do something actually creative with the space. Then I would search around for resources, hoping that I'd either be able to find assets that could be used, or (even better) a good scan of the back. Usually it wasn't the case that anything useful could be found, however, and I had to make a lot of them myself or heavily modify other resources. 

Here are a couple design highlights:

1) SELF-iSH by Will Wood and the Tapeworms is one of my favorite albums ever, but there was not a single good scan of the back, so I made it entirely from scratch.

2) In Rainbows by Radiohead was the exact same process.

3) Once again with Razzmatazz by I DON'T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME, this time I'll show the full design with the clear case in mind. In Rainbows was clear, but I found an image for the inside.

Once I made all of the designs I needed, I bought a bunch of random CDs from a local Goodwill, and stripped them of their contents. Then I took the designs, put them into a Word document to format them in a way that could be printed, and made those into PDFs. I then tried to print the designs myself, battled my printer for a good 30 minutes, accepted defeat, and went to an office store to print out my stuff. Unfortunately, I messed up the document format on one of them, so while I would have had 11, I only have 10 CDs to show right now.

I should add a disclaimer, the "In case I make it," CD design is u/Sufficient-Creme-548's design from when they were doing the same thing as I was.

My favorites on the inside are definitely EIAL and Razzmatazz. The clear cases really came through with these.

If you have any of the same CDs as I do, and you would like to do the same, I'd be more than glad to send you what I made to print out!

Anyways, I know it's kind of become a trend to say it, but it really is true: physical media is more important than ever right now with the rise of unreliable streaming services. As a bit of a personal anecdote, my favorite version of Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" is no longer available on Apple Music, and the only place I can reasonably listen to it outside of the music video is off of my CD that has the track. I started collecting CDs because I like holding something that I know I like in my hands, but it has become something much more important in the last few years, and it's a satifying hobby to have when you're just looking in secondhand stores and record shops. I'm still looking for MCR's first album and 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours on CD, and finding something like that when you've been searching for months or years is something else.

And if anyone is interested, here's the state of my CD shelf right now! I may make a little shelf to go in my bookshelf to double them up and save a bit of space soon. Ok byeee!