As part of a high school senior capstone project, I designed a turntable to see how vinyl music could be made more accessible. I wanted to make the turntable as simplified visually and functionally as possible. This involved using a simple two-color color scheme, creating components constrained to basic, geometric forms, and reducing the number of parts. I designed the turntable to operate solely at 33 1/3 RPM and turn on and off with the twist of a large knob. With these decisions, I intended to create an inviting and intuitively-understood turntable. I also wanted the turntable to be an easily-assembled kit. With this in mind, I sourced cost-effective commercial components. The twelve non-electronic components are entirely 3D-printed and assemble with fourteen identical screws. All in, the turntable costs roughly $55 to build.
While this turntable might not have the greatest audio quality, that's not the point. The idea is to give people a user-friendly, relatively low-budget way to mess around with vinyl music.
Please find an in-depth dive into my design process here (for computers only!)
These are some promotional and presentational posters I designed for my project's exhibition. The left poster was printed and hung around my high school. The right poster was printed at 18"x16" and used as a mat for the record player--the circle outline demarcates where a record will rest on the turntable if it is properly aligned on the mat.