I don’t think I have any actual 2003 Topps cards in my possession. That makes it hard for me to make a fair assessment of the blue borders. Digitally, they appear sometimes a vibrant, royal blue while also veering towards a lighter navy in some images I see. The results are thrown even more askew when factoring in the team colors of a particular card. For all the blue & red teams across the league, it looks pretty great. For any team that doesn’t have blue as part of its color scheme, it’s very jarring. So, once again, we’re turning the borders white.

There’s a good reason why more Topps flagship designs have had white borders than have not. (Okay, the real reason is probably because no-bleed borders are more cost-efficient when it comes to printing…) It makes the success of the design less conditional on the particular player or team. Just on these 3 cards here, the blue borders would look good but still different on the Colón and Bregman (royal vs. navy). And definitely bad on the Hudson. If you take that variable out of the equation, the results are going to be more consistent.

Moving past the borders, I decided that thickening up the line between the color box and the diamond photo would be a good way to introduce the secondary team color along with adding enough space for the team name to make an appearance. I kept the gold foil as a nice separator or elements and even let it stay for the player names. I think there’s probably enough contrast between those color boxes and the foil that it should be readable no matter what color (so long as it’s not black). The names have been right aligned so they line up with the new team name as well as to balance out the side of the card opposite the portrait and position. The last little tweak was adding a small color stroke around the photo to make the borders look more intentional and less like they’re just margins.