I designed it myself a couple years ago, with all intention of producing them as merch. What ended up happening is that I found out it's really really hard to make VHS sleeves.
They're supposed to be printed and die-cut from bulk card stock. The mechanisms for doing this are of course not available to me. Home printing is also difficult, because you can't make a sleeve out of a single sheet of 8.5x11. It would require two, which I would have to cut out by hand, then glue together. The resulting product would, frankly, look and feel like shit, and that's assuming I could even find a combination of printer & stock that worked and didn't jam every two or three sheets - and even then, I just don't have the space for this. It would require a whole room, basically, that I don't have, with a work table and a dedicated printer and and and.
It's a fun idea, but this is exactly the kind of merch item that kills independent creators when they offer it as a stretch goal or w/e without understanding what they're committing to. I don't want to spend hours a week gluing paper together only to have it fall apart in transit or a week later, and I don't want to send people sheets of warped and ink-soaked paper, or something that they have to assemble themselves which will just end up stuck on a shelf, unfinished and forgotten. If I were to sell these at all, they would need to be the real thing: die-cut (or CNC-cut) cardstock with glossy finish, capable of holding a VHS tape.
I looked into making them professionally. Unsurprisingly, it's hard to find a company that still makes VHS sleeves. I tried contacting some print shops, but for obvious reasons I felt constrained to only pursue shops that had queer-friendly signaling on their websites, which is pretty rare. I found maybe two; one didn't respond to me at all, and one didn't really seem to get what I was asking for. Because, see, the other problem is that I just don't know what I'm looking for. I don't speak Print, so I don't know what paper weights and styles exist, etc. What I need is a professional print shop that can solve these problems for me.
I want to hire someone for a few hundred bucks to go out and find the right paper and the right process to produce something that, to them, appears to be a VHS sleeve. I am too busy to handle all the intermediate steps beyond receiving a sample and telling them "yes, that's it" or "no, this isn't quite right." Unfortunately I don't think anyone exists who will perform this service; all the print shops I found just expected you to Place An Order, with all the questions already answered.
I have considered just making the .psd available, and I can't quite remember why I haven't done that. Maybe I'll put it on my web site.
