Local CD cover idea
Collective Fruit
Both eco-friendly and elegantly minimalist, the clear plastic beauty from local indie record label Collective Fruit (most recently used for the Severna Park EP Three Sixteen) wins hands-down. Label co-founder Nabil Ayers credits Lance Payne, his bandmate in Micro Mini, for coming up with the covers. Payne apparently got the idea from his day job at an Issaquah software company, where the clear cases (which tech-heads call "clamshells") are used to store CD-ROMs. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, Ayers explains: "Lance brought them back for us to send out Micro Mini advance CDs, and we just thought, these are cheap, easy to mail--great. After we sent them out, everyone kept asking, 'Where did you get these?'" It's the perfect innovation for Seattle musicians, since it's hard to get your hands on mass quantities without knowing somebody in the software biz. A quick call to a large CD mastering and duplicating franchise in town revealed that the covers can be ordered, but they're not kept in stock. Maybe Collective Fruit should think about launching a sideline in packaging. "We've toyed with the idea of doing a series of EPs with similar covers," Ayers says. "As far as I know, we're the first ones to use them."
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