is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
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I had one of those moments of consumer rage this morning, when I realized that it’s now virtually impossible to buy blank CD-Rs with nothing on the label side, meaning that if you want to buy some CD-Rs to back up your data or record some music, they will almost certainly feature branding from TDK, Memorex, Sony, Maxxel or some other company. You used to be able to find the kind of discs I’m looking for — you could call them generic CD-Rs — virtually anywhere, but after searching
Last year I had the same problem when my band was looking to do a small run of about 50 demo CD’s for a show we played. We went looking for these generic CD’s and after about two hours of driving around, found them at MicroCenter. The downside was that they were of a pretty crappy quality and thus 1/4 of the time they wouldn’t burn right. However, we’ve used some writable surface CD-R’s, that come blank which work pretty nice since they have this matte finish to them.
Probably looked at this one already, but 5inch.com has what you’re looking for. A bit on the pricey side, that’s capitalism for you.
I hadn’t checked out 5inch.com before — what a great tip, thanks a lot. I had actually ordered some generic CD-Rs from Neato.com, who aren’t as cool as 5inch.com apparently, but they shipped very quickly and were very nice.
That’s what I’m talking about. I thought I was the only one having this problem. I wanted non-branded 3″ CD-R’s but didn’t have any luck. I’ll check out 5inch.com. Maybe 5inch.com/3inch?? (Just joking. A geeky joke, at that.)