Blank VHS Cover Design

Remember These?

There was a time where every household in the world had a stack of blank VHS tapes lying around. As a kid they were like gold dust. You could trap the gems from Saturday morning TV for repeated re-watching, which was a godsend in a household where you could only get channels 1-4 (I grew up in the middle of nowhere, ok?).

What about this one?

Primarily, these covers were constructed of nothing more than geometric shapes and (usually, but not always) bold sans serif fonts with limited but strong colour palettes.

VHS were prevalent through the 80s and 90s, with the global boom in the medium causing there to be a massive variety of designs required for blank tapes, since there was an absence of advertising required for the cover.

This one?

I normally delve into the method used to print the designs I’m looking at, but in this instance that’s not what’s really interesting (they used offset printing, if you really must know). I’m sharing these to show how such simple design methods and styles can transport the viewer back to two very distinct decades and how these designs trigger nostalgia for people regardless of their personal design tastes.

No?

The early designs focussed a lot on the principals of Swiss design, taking the emotion and “art” out of something but still making it visually interesting while serving its primary purpose; displaying information. This started to shift quite evidently as digital tools became available to designers and TV/Movies started to incorporate CGI. Where there once would have been a flat, one colour circle there is now a digitally rendered and shaded 3D ball. Colour gradients started to get splashed all over the place and drop shadows made their way into everything as tech companies rushed to make themselves look the most technologically advance.

This one, surely?

Although I love the aesthetic of the 90s, it was a departure from what made traditional VHS covers so simple and, in my humble opinion, so gorgeous.