atlas's supa melodic CD Coasters - Design Tech Project

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My project consists of four acrylic 3.5-inch coasters with a design of a CD on the top. Each coaster/CD is a different color with a design inspired by some of my favorite albums (including one from my band, Crash Radish!!). I made sure to use a piece of the cover art to bring some attention to the original, along with using a color closest to one on the album. The albums I chose were Fandom by Waterparks, which is green with the band's logo, Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. by Hunny, which is orange, and has the font from the original album cover, boy by 2hollis, which is blue and has the + motif and the rays of light from the cover, and Spiramen Regia by Crash Radish (I wrote this!), which is pink with the radish design of our logo. 

I started with a base that was a circle with a 3.5-inch diameter, and a .75-inch diameter hole in the center. Then, to resemble the usually clear center piece on CDs, I made sure that each coaster had a 1.5-inch shallowly-engraved circle in the middle. The outer ring, with a width of 1 inch, was left for me to design my covers. (plan below)

    My first design was (bottom left) for the album Fandom, which has a green tiled background with a bright orange citrus fruit in the foreground, and the bold "FANDOM" and waterparks logo at the top. For this design, I chose green acrylic to resemble the background and started with the logos, using a font for the album name and image tracing a photo for the band logo, and curving it to fit the circle. Then, I made some curved triangles to represent the inner section of the fruit. Finally, with the remaining space, I created circles that were in the same placement, but increasingly smaller, to write all the names of the songs in.
    The second design (top right) was Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, which has the album name and the band name, Hunny, in a thick font with a simplified picture of flowers and oranges beside it. I chose orange acrylic because of the fruits' bright color, and wrote all of the album's tracks at the top. Using the image trace function, I got vectors of the font on the album's cover, which I placed around the right side and bottom so it would have some similarities to the original.

    The third (bottom right) was the album boy by 2hollis, which has the photo of 2hollis standing waist deep in the ocean, rays of light coming through the clouds, and his logo, which is the white outline of a plus. The sea and sky pushed me to pick blue acrylic, and I knew I wanted to add a large plus sign in the middle to represent his motif. This coaster ended up being my favorite, since I added the artist, album name, and rays of light inside the plus at a slightly different depth, which you can only see if you hold it up to the sun! I changed the sides of rectangles to make the rays of sunlight, added mesh forms to the words and slanted them, then added these all on top of the plus in the middle for this effect. Finally, I added all the names of the lyrics in clockwise order and added little +'s on the left side to even out the space.


The last coaster I designed (top left) was the coaster for my band, Crash Radish. This one took the longest because I had to receive and edit our logo (which is a radish in the shape of an explosion with the word CRASH! on it) as well as combine the shape to the circle multiple times to make sure the edges were flush with the cuts. I chose pink acrylic because I like it, and it was the most similar to red that was still clear acrylic, which is the original color of the background. I took the radish leaves and the crash font from our original logo, but remade the explosion to fit the curve of the CD and moved the small explosion pieces around to accentuate the logo. Finally, I chose a font that I liked, made a shape of the open space on the right side, and wrote all of the tracks down.

To make my coaster holder, I found a vector of heart music notes and used Adobe Illustrator to image trace them for my project. I also made a circle slightly smaller than the base and typed "Atlas's supa pawsome coasters" on the bottom, before reversing the whole image. This is because I want the image to show through the bottom and the top to be smooth. Finally, I cut out a thin wall and some circles for the center that I glued on with acrylic cement. This was probably the hardest step, as I needed to change the size of the base and walls multiple times, as well as flip the design to get it to be a perfect fit for my coasters. I also misjudged the thickness of my acrylic and had to do extra work to get the pieces out. If I could change anything, I might've re-cut the circles in the center of my holder, since there is a ridge that sometimes makes them hard to pull out. The only other thing I would've changed was my FANDOM CD design. I enjoy it, but I learned a lot about Adobe while making all my coasters, and I now think my design could've been more complex. 

Now that I have these cool custom CD coasters to go with my CD collection, I will store them next to each other and use them to protect the wood on my nightstand! I also will just show everyone I see because my CD collection is awesome, and now I have some coasters that match them (except that I need to finish writing my album.)!!!!

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