We’ve come to probably the biggest stinker of the the decade for Topps flagship designs: 2007. I’m not really sure what was going on in the hobby at the time but surely there’s something than can explain the total of effort behind that year’s design. Dull black borders, tiny dull squares, illegible foil text. The only thing I can come up with is they were going for simple and classy but they fell quite short there.

When it came to tackle 2007, my first move was to swap out the black borders for white. This may be a bit of cheating since that’s exactly what Topps did for the Opening Day product that year, but the results speak for themselves. Black borders are pretty notorious for showing any imperfections to the edges, so doing away with them is a big help there. And from a design standpoint, they really overwhelm and deaden any surrounding color. For 2007, the little bit of team color came from 4 sets of 4 tiny squares in each corner. Against white, those dots start to shine. My remix here took that same principle and expanded it for impact, turning 16 small dots into 4 big dots, letting the color pop.

The rest of the card is pretty much the same with just plain text on the top and bottom of the card. I did add some lines to each side of the team name and player first name just to inject a bit more color and also hammer home the square/geometric feel of the card. I also ditched the foil of color, including the Topps logo. It’s satisfying to see one color up top and the other color on the bottom. Finally, I kept the facsimile sigs from the original but changed them from black to white so they’d fit with the borders and also be easier to make out on darker photos.

These cards are still miles away from anything I’d call '“good,” but they’re definitely less bad than the originals.