Working through these remixes, 2005 was the one that gave me the most trouble. I didn’t do them in chronological order, so I had already tackled 2004 and 2008 when I got around to 2005. My biggest issue was that those 3 original designs have one very similar element: big text at the top of the card against a white background. True 2008 has the color dots, but there’s still a enough of a similarity that I always kinda clump them together. Given the opportunity to change these designs and differentiate them a bit, 2005 kinda forced my hand. But I’m satisfied with my solution.
Since there’s symmetry with the design on a left/right basis, I did the same top/bottom. The black bar at the bottom of the original underwent meiosis and found home at the top as well. Now the big last name text is in white so it’s nice and legible. I kept the team color tabs on the left and right sides to house the team name and player name. On the original, the two colors do a criss-cross move in the middle that always bugged me. I decided to just have a sharp gradient instead to get rid of the double lines around the whole photo. Topps has a hard time figuring out that if you stack these team color lines so close to each other, they visually meld into a mess, making either color hard to discern. No such issue here.
On the bottom, I went with the primary team logo instead of the script logo on the original. This is mostly because a lot of the team scripts are meant to go over white, not black, making it really hard to read/make them out. The logos are more stand alone and have white keylines to easily offset them from any background. In the bottom left corner, I switched out the year with the player position for two reasons: a) Topps never has the year on the front of the card, so I’m just keeping that consistent; b) the player and team are both identified on here twice, so it seems like the player position should be on there to justify doubling up on those two.
This is strangely the most I’ve matched from an original but also the most drastic change thus far.