00s Topps Remix Project: 2008

Nearing the end of the decade, Topps rebounded after the disaster of 2007 with a pretty good design for 2008. There seems to be a pretty good consensus that this was a really good, nearly perfect design — except for one huge flaw. The uvula I’ve heard it called. The little tab at the top of the photo for the Topps logo to sit. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me that much but I can see the issues other have with it. Udder-ly unnecessary. (sorry)

So that’s the starting point. Make the photo frame an actual rectangle (with round edges) and move the Topps logo to the corner like they’ve done time and time again. Once that was done, I really had a hard time finding things to change. I made the double-stroke frame team colors instead of just black. I also did away with the foil for the names and just made them team colors as well so I could add in the position at the end of the name with the opposite color. Maybe not my most inspired remix but the need wasn’t necessarily there to do a lot of reworking.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2007

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.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2006

Oddly enough, 2006 was the first remix I did for this project. I can’t remember specifically what spurred the idea of doing the whole decade or what compelled me to remix 2006, but as soon as I was done with it, it seemed like a no-brainer to tackle all ten designs.

While I don’t “get” the black bar on the foil curve that’s at the top of the original, I decided to keep it pretty close to the same. I suppose this is back around the time banners and ribbons started showing up a lot in the broader design trends, so maybe it was an attempt at that? I did tighten it up a bit so it doesn’t extend as far left-to-right and also shortened it up so it doesn’t dip below the foil arch at the top of the photo. Even though I’m usually a sucker for photo elements breaking borders, I didn’t think it was a good look here since the first border around the photo is foil. I’m sure you’ve experienced some wacky foil-stamping misalignment over the years. In this instance, the nice, smooth border is a must.

For the color bars, I kept them pretty much the same at top, with both bars the same thickness but added a think black stroke to help keep them separated. Where they stretched down to the bottom, I decided to make the primary bigger and have it house the player name. I ditched the banner where it used to live for a couple reasons: a) I didn’t like the shape of the flag edges folding back along the edges; b) it was too small and made the player name tiny to fit the space. Ditching the banner gave me more space to make the name bigger and legible and got rid of that little sliver of photo peeking through. The bottom bar has just enough space for the player position and also got rid of some of the extraneous black that Topps was in love with for that period.

Again, I went back-and-forth with how much to keep and how much to ditch, but since getting rid of the banner at the bottom was DEFINITELY going to happen, I decided the team name foil treatment had to stick around. In the end, I’m pretty happy with this remix.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2005

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.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2004

After a run of 6-straight years with colored borders, Topps started off a new streak in 2004 with white borders on their flagship design. In other words, don’t expect any more border color changes from my remixes.

The biggest change here is probably the dismissal of the silver foil for the team and player name stuff. I really have no issue with foil on white but I decided it was an opportunity to inject some more team color into the mix. I simplified the color border around the photo so it’s now just a solid thick color instead of…. whatever Topps did. I also rounded said borders because having some hard and some soft just didn’t work for me. I tried them all as sharp angles at first but It was too harsh.

Though I had some initial internal resistance, I decided to soldier on and keep the little player figures in the bottom left corner. These are arguably the defining design characteristic of this set, so I felt compelled to keep them. Luckily it’s hard to tell how poorly they’re drawn at such a small size. Inside the little figure box, I switched out the uniform number on the original with the player position. That allowed me to make the name a bit bigger, which was definitely an issue with the original.

All in all, I think this is probably one the best examples of fixing something up without really changing the spirit of the design. More than anything, Topps needs an editor to chip away at some of the extra-ness they’re prone to deploy.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2003

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.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2002

My 2002 remix brings the first drastic change from the Topps original (though probably not too drastic if you follow me on Twitter….). BUT, even if you saw that preview back then, there’s still something new for you here.

The most obvious change is the mustard yellow borders are gone. I don’t think they’re as notorious as the 1991 Fleer yellow borders, but they seem to have a bad reputation. That’s probably going to be the biggest no-brainer in this whole project. Against the white borders here, the ribbon motif is actually kinda fun and old timey without being cheesy. I redrew them a bit so the white edges make their way to the card borders. I change the font and put the names in white so they pop off the color banners and match the overall cleanliness of the design now. The last move was to replace the redundant “2002 Topps” text at the top edge of the photo with the player position since that was absent. It’s a better use of the space left up there to accommodate the ribbon on the left side.

With those tweaks, this easily shoots up towards the top of the list of best Topps designs in my book. They’re bright and colorful without being obnoxious, touch on some standard baseball imagery without being cliché, and do a good job of straddling the modern and vintage eras. Feel free to chime in if you think I’m going a little overboard with that praise.

00s Topps Remix Project: 2000

The Aughts were a bit of a lost decade for me when it comes to collecting. I didn’t buy a single card from the turn of the century until sometime in 2010. Though I dropped out of the hobby in the mid 90s, the early half of that decade found me VERY involved. Upon my return in 2010, I found myself checking up on what I had missed and became very overwhelmed. It was like trying to process an ancient book written in Latin, Aramaic, Mandarin and Klingon all at once. As a kid, I wasn’t all that interested in cards from the past (mostly because they were inaccessible to a kid) and just dove into what was current and upcoming at the time. I followed mostly the same tack as an adult. Though with the monetary barrier no longer in place, I did sample a few things from the previous decade. A lot came from random stuff in those retail repacks or whatever happened to be leftover for clearance at Walmart or Target. Just enough to get a taste but nowhere near comprehensive.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve been able to fill in the gaps here and there in the subsequent years. Whether stuff popping up on my Twitter timeline, random sale/trade threads on forums or simply just on the Cardboard Connection chronicle, I’ve seen enough of the decade to know that I missed out on a LOT of ugly designs. Being one who rarely misses out on an opportunity to pick apart card design, I felt compelled to put my mouse where my mouth is and do some “remixes”. I’ve done this in the past on my old blog and randomly on Twitter when the mood struck me. Here, I’m doing an organized stroll through the decade of Topps flagship designs I missed out on their first time around.

There are no hard-fast rules as to what I’m changing/keeping with each design. Foil, colors, fonts, structure, etc., are all open for reinterpretation. I will say that the aim is to not do anything radically different but to keep with the spirit and point of the original design (so much as I can determine a point exists). This isn’t a Project 2020 or Project 70 thing. I’m not looking to futz up everything to the point it’s nearly beyond recognition.

With that introduction, here’s my first entry: Topps 2000.

If you need a refresher on what the original 2000 design looks like, here you go. I kept this one pretty similar with the border color and basic construction the same. I decided to make the weird color shape a little more logical, leaving a uniform shape in the bottom left corner to better accommodate the team logo. One of my bigger beefs with the original was the tiny little tacked-on logo floating up above a color block that served no purpose other than to house “TOPPS 2000,” which is redundant since the logo already exists in foil in the upper corner. On the OG, the player name is in foil on top of a semi-transparent block, allowing a bit of the photo to show through. Unfortunately, that causes some legibility issues on some cards where that part of the photo is dark. To fix that, I extended the solid border so it’s behind the name, providing plenty of contrast to be read. I did keep the overlay element but shifted it to the team color bar. The original has colorized brushed metal texture there which I didn’t think was compelling enough to keep around. The team colors leave enough contrast for the player position in white, no matter the background photo. I kept some of the foil flourishes but now the add emphasis to the other elements instead of having to do much on their own.

Overall, this one’s not too different. Just a little tidier and more “purposeful” if that’s the word. Honestly, the original 2000 design was probably one of the better ones of the 00s. Stay tuned for 2001.