2025 Pennant

Opening Day is officially here! This is the most excited I’ve been for a baseball season in a few years, thanks to the Giants looking optimistically ok. That and it’ll be nice to have something else filling my social media feed besides the daily horrors of the despicable human feculence current running our country…

Sorry. Let me climb out of that well of despair and share my 2025 Pennant design.

The design is a pretty obvious riff on Topps’ 1958 and 1964 designs. Once again, I’ve gone with a limited color palette rather than true team colors. Having a black stroke around the text, color boxes and then the player images adds a bit of a comic book-y feel I like. Inserts to come as the season goes along. Happy Opening Day!

2025 Spirit Base

Now that Topps Series 1 has hit the shelves and Spring Training is up and running, it’s time to take a look at what 2025 has in store for my fake Spirit brand.

I went borderless once again like I’ve done for the past 14 years now (omg). Photographically, I tried to get a good variety of photos here, sprinkling in some actions shots along with stuff from the sidelines or dugout. Even with the action shots, I tried to pick some with interesting angles or a unique element. The Toglia one in particular is good example of a run-of-the-mill action that’s a little different than what you might typically see on cardboard. Of course the stuff like the Gatorade bath, tv interview, etc., might stand out a bit more.

As for the design, there are basically three elements all reflecting each team’s identity — the ribbon running from edge-to-edge with the player name, the secondary bar below holding the team name and player position, and then the wedge with the team logo in the bottom left corner. The 45-degree angle adds a little drama along with the stroke of the underneath bar overlapping the ribbon. There’s a little texture and depth in there but overall it’s a rather clean design.

I already have my designs for the Clubhouse, Pennant and Deluxe sets squared away. Just need to finish putting together all the cards and I’ll be posting those in the near-ish future. Maybe even before Opening Day!

Baseball Season (ish)

After the Eagles finished dismantling the Chiefs in the Super Bowl Sunday night, my Bluesky feed was full of posts declaring it “officially baseball season.” Pitchers and catchers are trickling into Spring Training facilities in Arizona and Florida. And with Topps Series 1 hitting the shelves on Wednesday, it’s fair to say it is indeed baseball season.

Fanatics released images of the 2025 flagship design last month and from what I’ve seen, the response has been pretty middling, at least compared to the near-universal praise the 2024 design received. I haven’t really seen anybody say they absolutely love the design but I also don’t really remember any intense hate for it either. That’s pretty much where I sit as well. But like past years, I do have a few tweaks I think would help the design overall.

On the left is the original Topps design and on the right my “remix.” The first thing I addressed was the big team name text on the left side. The outline on the original is just too plain hard to read. I don’t know if the physical cards will change a bit with the printing process (like the metallic shine on 2024’s neon elements) but on-screen, it’s a bit of a mess. I decided to place the text “inside” the colored bars but have them be a bit transparent so there’s a little depth there. Speaking of the colored bars, I tweaked the curves of the corners just a bit so they look “truer.” And I swapped the Yankees’ color palette to blue and red rather than the blue and gray Topps chose. Not sure why they want to make the cards less colorful, especially since the Yankees primary logo has more red than anything else in it.

The next area of adjustment is the bottom bar where the player name is. I’m just really not a fan of the treatment they gave it. The first name outlined with the drop shadow is a bad solution to a problem of their own doing. And the last name is a bit too thin weight-wise for my taste. They also seem to have made the gray bar fade out towards the bottom, adding the possibility of some legibility issues for some photos. My fix was to make it a solid bar as part of the border and then switch the typeface from Eurostile Wide to Eurostile Condensed Bold. And to keep with their motif, the first name is outline-only. The last name should be more prominent than the first in my opinion. Their original design has the opposite.

The one element that I have seen a lot of people praise the position indicator field icon in the bottom right corner. I kept that the same except updated the colors and then shaved the little tab off the bottom so the color border is straight across. After moving the Topps logo to the upper right corner, I called this one done. Nothing too drastic but enough little improvements I think makes a big difference overall.

2024 Pennant Dream Team

Time for another Pennant insert.

Keeping with the look of the 2024 Pennant base design, these feature black & white, high-contrast player cutouts over a gradient background. For these, I added a dreamy sky and baseball field overlay, so it’s not just a solid color block. Pairs well with the concept of the insert. I kept the text simple with “Dream Team” across the top and the last night along the bottom. No need to clutter with other info since these are the guys at each position. Here’s a look at the checklist I put together.

1B Bryce Harper
2B José Altuve
3B José Ramírez
SS Francisco Lindor
OF Mike Trout
OF Aaron Judge
OF Ronald Acuña, Jr.
C Adley Rutschman
DH Shohei Ohtani
UT Mookie Betts
SP Gerrit Cole
SP Corbin Burnes
SP Zack Wheeler
SP Justin Verlander
SP Spencer Strider
RP Edwin Díaz
RP Emmanuel Clase

The starting pitcher rotation was honestly a bit of task, especially considering we’re in such an age of pitching. Verlander is there on account of this being timed to the beginning of the season before he was on the IL. Same with Strider. There just aren’t the lights-out names these days like there always seemed to be in years past.

2024 Clubhouse All-MLB Team

Here’s a look at the All-MLB Team insert design for the Clubhouse set. I made them look a bit more chrome-like rather than foil-y like other stuff I’ve done in the past.

Looks like my third straight entry with some diagonal elements. Again, it works with the Clubhouse base design so I’m not too upset about that. The color scheme is red and blue to match the MLB logo, which makes an appearance in the bottom “wedge” here. The 1st and 2nd teams are differentiated by flipped colors and of course the big “1ST” and “2ND” elements along the right.

Gonna need to do something noticeably different for the next insert to break outta this groove. But overall I’m happy with what I’ve got going on here.

2024 Clubhouse League Leaders

Here comes another insert set for this year’s Clubhouse line. I’ve never done a league leaders set before so this is a first. I wanted to feature the top-10 finishers in double, triples and homers but with ties it ended up being a 38-card checklist rather than 30. Surprisingly, Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani would be the only repeats amongst the three categories. Here’s a look at the design.

Each category swaps out its shorthand in the bottom right corner, making it easy to differentiate the stats. The players’ tally is solid to the left of the big stat with some team color behind it to add some contrast. Above a white line slashing through the big stat is the player name over the other team color. And just behind the player is the “LEAGUE LEADERS” title at the top.

The diagonal elements work well with the rest of the Clubhouse designs for this year. And I always like to find a way to incorporate team colors into the proceedings. I tried to pick action shots that illustrate the category pretty well, hence the big follow throughs on the HR cards and running/sprinting on the 3B cards. It was also nice to do a card for guys like Will Benson or Ezequiel Tovar who don’t otherwise get a lot of love.

2024 Spirit All-Rookie Team

Let’s keep rolling with some inserts now while I have some momentum. Time for the Spirit All-Rookie Team set. This is a 15-card set with the top rookies at each position and 5 best rookie starting pitchers for the 2023 season. Here’s the checklist:

  1. Yainer Díaz - C

  2. Triston Casas - 1B

  3. Matt McLain - 2B

  4. Josh Jung - 3B

  5. Gunnar Henderson - SS

  6. Corbin Carroll - OF

  7. Nolan Jones - OF

  8. James Outman - OF

  9. Spencer Steer - DH

  10. Andrew Abbott - SP

  11. Tanner Bibee - SP

  12. Bobby Miller - SP

  13. Eury Pérez - SP

  14. Kodai Senga - SP

  15. Yennier Cano - RP

Design-wise, there’s a big diagonal bar running behind the player cutouts with the “2023 All-Rookie Team” text running over it. The “All-Rookie” portion overlaps the photo but with a little bit of transparency, the image shows through. The rest of the text is behind the cutout to show some depth. At the bottom of the card is another bar for the name and position running over the whole photo. The bottom right corner has a team color overlay and space for the team logo. The different planes and overlapping is meant to add depth and make things a bit more dynamic.

Here’s a look at the autograph parallels. Everything is the same but with a white autograph strip for the player signature. The original design really lended itself to an easy auto solution.

2024 Spirit Team MVP

Rolling through the customary inserts I do each year, it’s time for the Spirit flagship’s entry, Team MVPs — a 30-card set sporting each team’s best player.

Each year, I try to figure out a way to incorporate a jersey swatch into the letters for MVP. I think this is the first time I’ve had the swatch run behind the letters rather than fill them. I think it helps for readability not having to drop the hole for the middle of the P.

The other design features include a team-color background with some grain added for contrast to the full-color player image. The “TEAM MVP” text is a team-color-ish shiny foil spot for some extra pizzazz. The team primary logo rest next to TEAM. Simple name and team text at the bottom finish things out.

2024 Pennant Throwbacks

First insert for the Pennant set his year once again is the Throwbacks set, featuring players wearing, you guessed it, throwback uniforms. I had a hard time tracking down a lot of instances of teams wearing old-time uniforms in 2023. I blame the whole City Connect thing for that. The only ones I could track down were the Diamondbacks, Marlins and Rays. Expansion-palooza, minus the Rockies who have yet to really change their look since their conception.

The design has the same black-and-white cutout over gradient motif as the base set, though I tweaked the colors to match the team colors of the respective uniforms. The large ‘THROW BACKS’ type looks kinda like an old boxing flyer or something like that from the past.

There’s also a relic version with a swatch from the actual uniforms depicted in the photo. This one has a teal pinstripe, which looks pretty cool. The autograph version has the gradient and photo fading out to white at the bottom to leave room for a legible signature. I don’t think I had seen Arozarena’s sig before but it’s pretty cute, lol.

2024 Clubhouse All-Stars

Today is one of the most boring days of the year — the Thursday after the MLB All-Star Game, when there are zero games on the schedule and no games from the day before to discuss. It is, however, the perfect opportunity for me to post my 2024 Clubhouse All-Stars design, featuring members from last year’s midsummer classic.

Going off the vibe of the 2024 Clubhouse base design, these All-Star cards are clean but bright. Like I’ve done in the past, I used both blue and red in the design but swapped them on the AL and NL cards, respectively. (Mostly because I can never remember which color is “traditionally” associated with each league.) There’s a shiny, refractor-y star pattern along the top border to make these stand out in a pack. I think my favorite item here is the notation in the bottom right corner showing how many times each guy has been an all-star selection. Super satisfying.

2024 Pennant

After accidentally deleting all the linked PSDs a month or two again, I just finished up redoing my 2024 Pennant set yesterday. Time to share.

These are retro without calling back to a specific time period or design. Nuts and bolts of the design are basically a black-and-white high-contrast player photo on top of a color gradient and then a solid color block at the bottom for their name and team/position text. Rather than going with exact team colors, I decided to do what Topps did back in the day and assign each team its own combo of colors from a general color palette. It’s kinda of a hard task since there are so many red/blue teams in the league. To help that, I picked a couple different blues and a few different reds to mix things up a bit.

This was a fun set to do other than having to do the images two separate time. It did give me a chance to swap out Luis Arraez for the Marlins since he got traded to the Padres after my first go round. Hopefully nobody else featured here changes teams before I click “publish” on this bad boy.

2024 Clubhouse

We're a week into the 2024 MLB season and somehow I've yet to see a single inning of baseball. I guess this is the reality when you have a one-year-old to focus on. I've been keeping up with the league as best as I can through social media and the MLB app but it hasn't been easy. Luckily, I've been working ahead a bit on my 2024 designs and it's already time for the 2024 Clubhouse set.

White border return with splashes of the team primary and secondary colors. There's a little bit of a pennant motif that pairs really well with the Clubhouse logo. Each photo finds space to break out of the frame a bit and overlap the name bar a least a little, though there are places like the Harold Ramírez card where it interacts with the name a bit more.

The vibe here is very "early 90's Score" which I've always been personally partial to. If Topps were to shoot for this with the Big League product, I think the response would be a lot more positive than what they've been getting.

2024 Spirit Base

With Spring Training up and running, it’s time to share my 2024 Spirit base design.

I believe this is the first time I’ve shied away from using some element of the team logo on a Spirit base design. The team names are big and stretched across the bottom of the card, overlapping a spectrum of the team colors. Tucked inside an opaque strip are the player names and positions. That leaves plenty of room for the photograph to be the main focus of the card. While simple, I find the design to be rather bold with the vibrant colors and the large team names.

The backs are vertical as well with plenty room for full-career stats like Machado here. Team logos make an appearance on the back so they’re not completely absent from this year’s set. All in all, this is a pretty clean design for me as I’ve been using a lot of textures and effects in stuff the past few years. Not sure if this is an outlier or not but it was nice to do something a little different. Stay tuned to see what’s next.

2023 Pennant

Finishing up my 2023 designs is Pennant, the “retro” set in the Spirit family. I went with a 70s-ish look for this year’s design and for the first time kept the color palette limited to around 8 colors rather than doing team-specific colors like I usually do. While there is some overlap from team-to-team (I mean, there are so many red and blue MLB teams), I was able to keep teams in the same division from having a duplicate palette.

The photos also have undergone a treatment making them look less modern. It helps put the design in the right era and really drives home the “retro” feel in relation to the rest of the Spirit releases.

2023 Clubhouse

Before the 2024 designs start to drop, here’s a look at my 2023 Clubhouse set. This is meant to be the “fun” set for low-budget collectors. I tried to ramp up the fun here by featuring as many out-of-the-ordinary photos as I could.

I think the Randy Arozarena one is probably my favorite, though the Ha-Seong Kim one is pretty great, too. Design-wise, these are meant to “connect” from card to card as you can see in the grid up there. The colored circles will line up at the edges, à la 1990 Topps. That means that not every, say, Mets card will have the logo on the right side. The next card in the checklist would have it on the left, then right, and so on. I just did the teams like this so you get the gist.

The player names arch along with the logo slice which is nice to have instead of on a straight line like usual. The position and team name do run next to it on the secondary color block to help balance the palette a little.

Overall, I think these strike the right balance between being fun but not too crazy, with a big assist from the photography. Bright and colorful without anything too over the top. I’d have been a big fan of something like this as a kid.

2023 Spirit Base

Sneaking this in before the ball drops on the year, here’s a look at my 2023 Spirit base design for every team.

As it’s tradition by now, the design features a full-bleed photo the visual elements color-coded by team. The look on this year is sort of a triangular scroll with the player name position in the middle with the team logo on the left wedge and the Spirit logo on the right wedge. I added a bigger triangle to the bottom right corner to help balance the composition and also add even more team-identifying elements.

Like last year, I had a few different designs I tried out before arriving at this one. Here are the ones that didn’t make the cut.

The last two here were riffs off the same basic hook with the last one winning out. Ultimately, though, it couldn’t top the design I chose in the end.

I’ll try to do some more design dumps before the new year to show I haven’t been completely slacking. Hopefully 2024 will allow me more time to get back on the horse here.

What's Up?

Well, it’s been almost a year now since my previous blog entry. I know the “sorry I haven’t posted a while” thing is a bit of a trope but I’ve had a pretty good excuse for my absence.

I’ve been taking care of this little rat since last February. Say hello to Augustus, or Auggie as we call him. He’s completely changed our lives over the past 8 months in numerous ways. Mostly as it pertains to this blog, it means a lot less time for me to make fake baseball cards and share them with the world. Can you blame me, though? I mean, look at that chubby little face. He’s so fun and cute and funny and sweet. And even when he’s being a big baby, I’m happy to be spending my time with him.

But, as he’s gotten older and we’ve adjusted to our new home life, I have found myself with a bit more free time to piddle around designing. While I won’t be posting with the same frequency as before, I will find the time to share some of my work now and again. I have a bit of a backlog to get posted here but 2024 will most likely bring a new normal with it. Just wanted to check in and show off what I think is by far my best creation thus far.

Mocktober, Pt. 2

November is here, which means a chance to gather all of my Mocktober designs from this year’s MLB Postseason. Just like last year, I created a unique card design for every postseason game featuring the “player of the game” for each contest. With the expanded playoff format this year, I knew I’d be doing more cards than previous years. Luckily, the way each series played out there weren’t an overwhelming number of extra games. The final count was 40 cards this year compared to 37 last year.

Jeremy Peña was the most featured with 4 individual cards. That makes sense since he was the ALCS and World Series MVP. Yordan made it onto 3 cards (with Peña getting a cameo on that final WS card). There were a couple of firsts for me this time around. Thanks to the Phillies’ historic homer-fest in Game 3 of the World Series, I did my first 5-player design. And then the following night, Cristian Javier and 3 other Astros pitchers combined for a no-hitter. In trying to figure out a way to feature them all without making another multi-player card, I focused on Javier while giving the rest of the crew the old hologram treatment. Thanks to some Photoshop tutorial vids on YouTube, I feel like I did a decent job with the hologram effect.

Looking at the whole lot now, it looks like I had better ideas as the postseason went on. I think that’s almost exclusively thanks to the number of games happening each day in the first round. That old adage “done is better than perfect” was definitely in play there. But this whole exercise is precisely about churning out ideas and trying out different things. All of them aren’t going to be great, but they’re all valuable.

2022 Pennant

There is no baseball until Friday. We have only 4-7 games of 2022 baseball left. Seems like a perfect time to get around to posting the rest of my 2022 Spirit stuff (though I’m sure I’ll be doing that well after the World Series, too). I’ve done the Spirit base set, the Clubhouse set, and a smattering of inserts for both. Next up is the Pennant design.

If you’ll recall, Pennant is the “retro” set. I use that as a vague direction to basically go for whatever non-modern vibe I feel like rather than trying to focus in on a specific era or set from the past. Anything that’s not objectively modern or contemporary will usually work for the brand.

There’s a look at the design spread across all 30 teams. White(ish) borders with team color cameo-style photo frames. I tried a few different looks for the frame details before sticking with this here. Some were too plain, some too gaudy. I think this hits the mark. I also did a “retro” treatment on the photos to make them look a bit old, though didn’t go the full Gypsy Queen route. I wanted to make sure the card were still bright and colorful.

Not sure if I’ll get around to doing inserts for this set, but I think the base design here is probably one of the most solid I’ve done. I have a couple of recurring insert themes I could easily revisit if the mood strikes. Stay tuned I guess.

2022 Spirit Award Winners

Other than when I’m remixing/tweaking previous designs, I try to do my best at being original when making new cards. Sure, there are a lot of intentional nods and references to other designs, but I usually shy away from blatantly lifting someone else’s work and calling it “my” design. But when I saw this tweet from MLB on Twitter, I couldn’t help but think what a good card design it would make.

It’s a nice presentation of two players on two different teams showing them on equal footing. Though I didn’t do it on last year’s set, I have utilized a 2-up design for the Award Winners insert in past years. This seemed like the perfect way to interpolate this graphic into a card.

Putting the AL and NL Gold Glove and Silver Slugger winners at each position back-to-back fits perfectly. I designated the AL side as blue and the NL side as red, screening back the league logos in the big color boxes on the bottom. I really liked how the original graphic had the skyline/trees in there but I don’t think every MLB city lends itself to that conceit as well as NY and LA do. Other than adding the player names at the bottom and some gold/silver to the scheme, it follows the “inspiration” pretty closely. I did run into the issues of finding photos that fit together as well as the Cole/Trout combo. The Devers/Riley card works beautifully but when it came to finding fielding photos for the Gold Glove guys, it was a bit more challenging since great fielding isn’t always well-confined to a vertical frame. Minor quibbles.