2022 Clubhouse All-Stars

With the 2022 MLB All-Star starters being announced last Friday and the All-Star Break coming up next week, it seems like a perfect time to share my design for the 2022 Clubhouse All-Star insert.

These of course feature the dudes that made the 2021 All-Star squads (in case the post name was a bit confusing). I went for something different than the usual “star” motif that I’ve used in All-Star designs in the past. And instead of having the leagues designated by strictly either red OR blue, this design features both colors equally for both leagues, just changing up their placement in the design to help distinguish between the two teams. The diagonal boxes add some movement to the design while the foil board/chrome space behind the player cutout makes things shiny as nod to these players being stars. Add in the player overlap and these end up being dynamic considering they’re basically just made up of geometric shapes.

2022 Clubhouse

Time for the next release on the 2022 Spirit calendar. Clubhouse is the “fun” set geared towards younger collectors or those not so smitten by modern hobby pillars like autographs, parallels, etc.

These may look a bit familiar as they’re a re-worked version of one of the Spirit base designs I was tinkering with back in January. They received some positive feedback but I felt they didn’t fit the vibe of the Spirit base design I had established in the past 10 years. Luckily, they fit the Clubhouse vibe pretty well with bright colors, some bubbly text and an almost cartoon-ish twisting wave, though some adjustments were made. The obvious change is adding a white border to the cards which instantly places them alongside what a lot of folks consider a baseball card to be. (There’s a reason Topps has added borders back to their flagship design the past two years). Adding borders allowed me to make the team logos a bit bigger. The other change was including the accolades text in the bottom right below the position banner.

Back side of 2022 Clubhouse card for Yordan Álvarez featuring his biological info and MLB career stats.

The backs have the color ribbons at the top with the primary color bleeding off the top edge. Yordan only has 3 seasons under his belt so there’s plenty of room for his full career stats, but for longer-tenured players, they’ll probably have just 10 seasons and full career line.

I don’t have any done right now but there will be some Clubhouse inserts to follow, including the traditional Clubhouse All-Stars. Hopefully some other “fun” ideas come to mind.

2022 Spirit Team MVP

Time for the first insert design to make an appearance. I’ve been doing the Team MVP cards since the very first Spirit set back in 2012. I’m sure I’ve missed a year or two along the way but it’s been the closest thing to a stalwart for the past decade.

Once again, these are relic cards with a jersey or bat swatch comprising the M-V-P text. The design elements mirror the 2022 Spirit base set with team color tabs filled with a brushed metal texture and the same typeface. The only thing new is I set it all at a an angle to add a little verve since these are (presumably) the best players on each team.

2022 Spirit Base (Take Two)

We’re less than a week away from the actual Opening Day for the 2022 season. It’s been a long and tenuous journey but we’re finally (almost) there. A couple months ago, when the lockout was crushingly rolling along, I was desperate from some positive baseball vibes and posted my initial ideas for the 2022 Spirit Base set design.

Since I was a bit on the fence about which design worked best as the continuation of the Spirit “brand” I had established for a whole damn decade now, I also put out a call for feedback which was thankfully received. Even though the design that people had the most enthusiasm for wasn’t the one I ultimately ended up choosing, it was still a valuable exercise. It helped confirm for me which design I thought worked best but also moved me to make some tweaks that I resulted in a better final product.

I went with the “metal tabs” because it simply looks the most “Spirit” in my mind. Colorful, clean design elements, full-bleed photos, team logos, and all the pertinent information presented in a concise, satisfying manner. The aforementioned tweaks are subtle but definitely an improvement. If you need help, I extended the bar holding the player’s first name all the way to the left edge, adding a little bit of a two-tone look. The other one is the dark screened bar on the bottom right that was seen on the first draft for players that obtained some notable accolade in 2021. As I was building the cards, the non-award ones looked empty and imbalanced. So I decided to keep them around for everyone and just have the full team name listed. I know it may seem like overkill to have team logos and the team name both here but I think it’s handy for the instances where the logos don’t share all the details to newcomers (Pirates, Guardians, Braves for example).

As per usual, the card backs contain the same design motif as the front. I decided to pare down the biographical info, cutting stuff like college and draft info and use that real estate for stats instead.

Here’s to an exciting 2022 season! May your favorite players rake/deal, stay healthy and not become an embarrassment for their fans or the league at large.

Baseball Is Back!

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the MLB owners ended their lockout yesterday after reaching agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement with the MLBPA. Even though the league and owners are still set to make a disproportionately large fortune compared to the players (you know, the guys that are actually responsible for what compels people to spend their money and attention on), it’s still nice to have the 2022 season no longer in a coma. After working myself into a teeth-gnashing fury multiple times on Twitter reading the immature, narrow-minded, or greed-worshipping “fans” railing against the players for not taking a shitty deal, I’m ready to turn towards sunnier thoughts.

Before I move on to the “official” 2022 season designs, I decided to put a cap on the 2021 season with my very first printed set. I searched all around online to find a vendor that makes trading cards but kept running into the same limitation: they’ll print you a bunch cheap, but only a bunch of copies of the same card. In other words, you can get like 100 cards cheap, but only 100 of the same card, not a 100-card set. Major bummer. The only place I found an option of printing multiple images on an order was with Moo, but they don’t do the standard 2.5” x 3.5” trading card. I decided to compromise and come up with a 50-card set to print on their square business cards. They’re 2.56” square, so almost the same size as regular cards. Close enough in my book.

So, 50 cards. That sounds like a good number for a “best of” set. Say hi to the 2021 Spirit Stars of Baseball.

Like the all-star squads, every team is represented here. Unfortunately, that means some of the guys who had top-50 performance last year didn’t make the cut. I don’t think there are any glaring omissions other than maybe Acuña and Luis Robert, but their injuries had to be taken into consideration. Because I sure as heck wasn’t going to do 100 of these. The design was labor-intensive with every card requiring me to cut the player out, color-correct the photos, create a halftone background image and then color-theming them each. It’s a colorful set while some teams’ palettes didn’t lend themselves to a really great overprint effect (Padres, Pirates, Rays).

Here are a few photos of the finished product. The paper stock is about the thickness of Heritage and the finish is a smooth matte on both sides. I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out. Unfortunately, the 12-pocket pages I got are just a little too tight to page these up, but they fit into standard penny sleeves and toploaders. I’d try my hand at making more of these if there’s a market for such a thing. There’s still some cost involved that would prohibit me from just printing a bunch and try to push them. But if enough interest was shown, I might ponder another set in this format.

Anyway, welcome back, baseball. Loving you isn’t always easy but I can’t help myself. Play ball!

That's the Spirit

With the owners finally getting serious about making progress to stop the lockout, there’s a bit of a hopeful vibe going in regards to the 2022 MLB season. Even though I’d be perfectly happy to lose games if it means the players getting a fairer deal, it seems like the wheels are moving and things may actually get resolved somewhat soon. All of this is to say that I’ve been working towards my 2022 Spirit set design.

This is year number 11 for me in doing this fake card company. And as you can expect, having just a singular person in charge of all the design decisions can lead to a bit of burnout. Maybe not burnout so much as the well getting a little bit shallow. While I’m not tied to 70 years of history and nostalgia like Topps, there are a few consistent guidelines I’ve imposed on myself through the years to help rein in the brainstorming a bit. For the Spirit flagship set, it’s been stuff like full-bleed photos, design elements that use actual team colors, and a solid composition that’s interesting enough without having to lean on “effects”. On that last bit, I do add some textures/effects to the design but only afterwards to help the cards look contemporary to the era instead of flat like the “golden era” of cards.

All told, I ended up with 4 different designs to weigh and ultimately choose. They all have their merit but none of them were jumping out at me, screaming “THIS IS THE ONE.” So, I made a Twitter poll in an attempt to narrow down the good and the bad. Let’s go through them one by one.

The first crack at it was this one I dubbed “metal tabs” in said Twitter poll. There were a few Spirit designs that are somewhat similar to the basic bones here. It’s a bar across the bottom of a full-bleed photo with team colors added to the shapes, team logo and the player name plainly but tastefully included. The rounded edges to the color blocks give this a little bit of a late 90s/early 00s feel, especially the screened accolades tab on the bottom right for applicable players. Compositionally, I’m really happy with how I’ve resolved the task of included all of these informational elements. The only flourishes are the metal textures and the beveling around them I added to make everything a little more contemporary. It’s a solid design but there must’ve been something missing because I kept on plugging away with others after putting a bow on these.

My next stab (“target practice”) was the simplest of the bunch. I took a page out of the 92 Stadium Club playbook and had just the smallest little imposition of design rising up from the bottom corners. Keeping with the Spirit standards, the tab became the team primary color. I added a little circle tab for the logo and connected both elements to make it look like a little spinner thingy. For the names, I had to find a typeface that was somewhat condensed to begin with since the tab wasn’t super wide. I went with one that had a variety of weights and widths (Dharma Gothic) because, as you can seem from the Vladito card, there are some really long names that would show up across the whole set. It definitely looks better on TUCKER and INDIA, but it passes on GUERRERO, JR. With the tab already crowded, I had to use the circle for the player position and didn’t find a good spot for the accolades. This was the winner on the Twitter poll, which totally took me by surprise. Mostly because this is the least designed of the group.

The third bunch here (“take off”) was what I figured would win the Twitter poll. It ended up getting the fewest votes… So it may be time to pack it up, Ross. I guess I might have been unduly influenced by the knowledge that this one took me the most time to design. Not the final product, but the journey from idea to finished design. There’s still a lot I favor here. It does the best job balancing the colors. The names are more readable here than the previous two designs. I dunno, it just scratches that itch for me of being nice and compact without being boring. The accolades treatment really works for me, too. Maybe people didn’t like it because it looks like something else I can’t place? Who knows. The only thing that jumps out at me is the fact the design elements reach the two bottom corners, which is something I’ve done more than once before.

Finally, we have “bubble waves,” which is the outlier of vibes in the group. It’s unabashedly more playful than the other entries, with the big colorful waves rolling off the left and right edges. The big blocky text for the names is different, too, as the other cards featured more condensed typefaces. So while this is definitely not a Spirit flagship design, it did prove to be popular enough that I’ve already decided it fits perfectly with the Clubhouse feel. You’ll be seeing it on this blog in the future, with some modifications to fit that line even more appropriately.

With all of that to chew on, there’s still some work to do before I “officially” unveil the 2022 Spirit flagship design. I’m not sure if I should do with the masses and tweak the “target practice” design or go with one of the others by executive order. Regardless of which path I take, there’s still another 26 teams to make cards for along with a card back or two. And while progress has been made by the MLB and MLBPA, I’m guessing there will be plenty of time before I make that official post. See ya then!

Goodbye, 2021

Happy New Year, all. As many do when the calendar turns over at the end of December, I’m looking to let go of the past and look forward to the future. So here’s a look at some of the 2021 Spirit cards I made that didn’t quite get polished enough for a proper post.

First up is the Spirit Deluxe Duos dual autograph cards. Not a lot to these other than adjusting the elements of the Deluxe base design to accommodate two players and their sigs. The primary/secondary team color marble spaces add a little bit more interest here.

Next we have the Spirit Hall Marks insert, featuring guys that are approaching some statistical milestones that are close to shoo-ins for induction. Now, I really doubt Nelson Cruz gets the call, but the fact he’s just 2 average seasons away from 500 is kind of an eye-opener. And of course, Max got his 3,000 Ks this year (though in a different jersey). As for the design, the cool thing here would be the embossed placard portrait that mimics the actual plaques in the hall. They’d look a lot better printed than I could render them here.

Lastly, this WARriors insert didn’t really make it past the first draft stage. There’s not a lot of “there” there, but I figured I’d share rather than memory-hole it. Plus, Gausman’s not a Giant anymore, so I can’t exactly resurrect it for 2022. Assuming there is baseball in 2022…..

Anyway, those are the loose threads of 2021 neatly tied up here in one post. I’m not sure what the whole Spirit project will look like in 2022, but I’m guessing I’ll start getting the itch in a month or so to start working on a new Spirit base design. Beyond that, I’m open to anything.

2021 Spirit Award Winners

Now that the 2021 MLB season is over and all the awards have been handed out, I figured it’d be good to show my Spirit insert honoring the 2020 Gold Glove and Silver Slugger winners.

Once again, these feature the same design for both leagues and both accolades with the foil and color elements differentiating between Gold Glove / Silver Slugger and NL (red) / AL (blue), respectively. It was an accident that the players I picked for the GG samples here have team colors that match their league designations so well. Hopefully it doesn't distract from the design too much, which is pretty simple as it is. In the past, I’ve gone with both “buttoned-up'“ and kinda “out there” vibes, so these clean cards fit in with their predecessors fairly well.

Mocktober

Well, the 2021 MLB season has officially come to an end with the Braves winning the World Series earlier this week. And even though I didn’t watch a single game of final series, I was followed along the entire postseason thanks to my Mocktober project. I did this in 2019 but without the clever name. Basically, whomever is the player of the game for each potential contest, I would make a card featuring them the following day. Each design would be something completely new for me (no leftovers, repurposed designs, etc.). Then I’d add it to a thread on Twitter and watch the 1s of likes just roll in. The purpose of the whole thing is to keep my creativity flowing and try out new stuff. Occasionally, something good-to-great would break through. And then of course there were a few flops here in there. But the schedule and volume of games dictated that I wouldn’t spend too much time on a particular card, so the misfires can be excused. If you didn’t happen to follow along on Twitter or maybe missed a post here or there, I’ve collected all the final 37 images here.

The styles here run the gamut, from retro to modern, bordered to full-bleed, clean to overdone. Seeing them all here side-by-side for the first time, it’s easy for me to pick out which ones would work for a full set and which would be one-offs or inserts. I do know this year I seemed to design the cards around the photos a bit more often than I usually do. I guess that’s understandable given that the player featured is pretty much set in stone and the images are limited to a single game. Normally, I have a season’s worth of photos to comb through so I can find the right one to fit a design.

So long, 2021 season. Hopefully the 2022 campaign starts on schedule or close to it. I’m willing to sacrifice a bit as a fan, though, if it means the players get a better shake and the owners reign of terror gets toned down a bit. (Not holding my breath on that one.)

2021 Pennant Throwdown

It’s been a bit since I posted the 2021 Pennant base design so I figured it was time to do a Pennant insert. Traditionally, I’ve tackled the Throwbacks insert first since it’s pretty fun and easy but I ran into a slight problem. Due to the COVID-shortened season, there weren’t any “throwback” games in 2020. And while I very well could’ve used some of the early 2021 throwback games, that seemed like a cheat to me. So instead of throwing back, we’re gonna throw down.

I believe this is the 3rd edition of the Throwdown insert, which always features a pair of players who are either on rival teams or have a noteworthy connection between them. The Dodgers and Astros aren’t technically rivals but after the whole 2017 World Series thing, I suppose they hate each other like a rivalry. The Harper/Scherzer card can qualify for both since they used to be teammates and they’re division rivals, too. (Yes, I know Max is with the Dodgers as of this post but if these were real cards on a real release schedule, they’d have been made long before the 2021 trade deadline.)

This is the first time I’ve done a vertical design for these. They’ve been horizontal to allow themselves for an easier autograph parallel but I had a different idea this year. In staying in line with the 2021 Pennant base design, I used the same photo treatment on the players as well as the same fonts and general look. Doubling up on players per card makes the photo tweaking effort twice as tedious. So instead of doing four duos, I decided to keep these same pairs and make the autograph versions a little different.

The color boxes get the axe so the autographs can be nice and legible (as far as these particular ones can go). The THROWDOWN title gets split and screened back to add a bit of visual texture and fill in for the solid colors’ absence. Theres some color coordination to help keep the sigs and players sorted together. All in all, I’m pretty happy with both iterations. The autograph versions are a bit similar to the 2017 version but hopefully there’s enough difference to keep them distinguishable in the long run.

2021 Clubhouse All-MLB Team

As a basketball collector in the early 90s, I was a big fan of the All-NBA 1st/2nd/3rd Team inserts in Fleer Ultra. Not necessarily for the designs (some were pretty atrocious) but the logic behind their creation. The All-NBA Teams were a great way to encapsulate who were THE best players for the year. It was more exclusive than the all-star rosters and less influenced by reputation and previous accolades. Needless to say, when MLB started up the practice of naming an All-MLB 1st and 2nd Team in 2019, I was on board.

With my 2020 Spirit project, the All-MLB Team cards were relegated to a subset within the base set. That meant the design didn’t veer too far from the base design. This year, I’ve moved them over to the Clubhouse brand and made them a standalone insert set. I’m sure the first thing that comes to a lot of minds when seeing these is “reject Bowman design,” which is actually kinda what I was going for. The red and blue streaks bleeding into the corners is a twist on the 2021 Clubhouse base design. Then all the tabs, notches, bevels, etc. are my version of what Topps does with a lot of their designs these days, but on a little bit more basic level. I think it’s fairly easy to see that there’s still a good, solid composition here if you were to strip away all the effects and everything extra. This is my way of bridging the old, simplified era of card design to the modern, kitchen sink era. Some superfluous stuff still persists, but the dial is turned way back down.

2021 Spirit Deluxe

I’ve done the “flagship.” I’ve done the “retro.” I’ve done the “low-end.” Now it’s time for the “high-end” set in Spirit’s lineup of releases. Deluxe is back once again, kicking off with the base design.

This is the first time I’ve done a primarily white design for Deluxe. The marble texture adds some interest there and calls back to a fancy set from the past. The colored marble behind the player makes for a good contrast to the both the borders and the player photos. The whole thing is trimmed out in gold foil with it running around the border and also the player name and team name/logo in the upper left corner.

I didn’t go into ornate-overload like Topps frequently does for stuff like Tribute, Tier One and the like. Probably a little more “overdone” than I normally do but I still pulled back a bit from what could have been done. I’ve tried to keep some variety to the Deluxe designs over the years so this year’s look is definitely different from previous seasons. Still plenty of color to catch the eye help differentiate each card. Imagining these with a thick gloss surface and they’d really pop.

2021 Spirit Team MVP

Time for the first insert of the 2021 Spirit set. This has been a longtime inclusion in my Spirit designing endeavor, with this being my 6th entry into the logs.

Like every other year, I’ve made this an all-relic set with the MVP letters housing the relic. That means using a big, bulky typeface for the MVP as well as somewhere else in the design. This year, I carried over some design elements from the 2021 Spirit base design, namely the herringbone-esque texture and the name font. Behind the player cutout is a colorful, textured background image with a zoomed-in look at the jersey script from the photo. It’s a nice contrast to the clean lines on the rest of the design. Also included is the team logo along with the 3-letter shorthand for each club I’ve found myself using a bit.

I’m pretty pleased with the composition here and just the overall vibe. Combining clean and textured into the same design might be a good summation for my personal aesthetic.

2021 Clubhouse

I’ve had these designs in the can for a while but figured I should probably get this posted before the trade deadline. In case you haven’t been following my projects or need a refresher, Clubhouse is the “value” or “budget” line of Spirit cards. Think Topps’ Big League of today or Upper Deck’s Collector’s Choice of yore. These are meant to be fun, colorful and appealing to all ages, not just dudes in their 40s or older.

The design here is pretty simple with rounded rectangles showing off the team colors. Each color gets a pair of tabs going off the edge of the card, breaking the white borders but still keeping everything crisp and clean. I found space for the name at the top, which is something I’ve noticed goes a bit against the grain lately. Even with my own designs, I find myself placing the names towards the bottom of the card. Can somebody pinpoint the birth of that trend?

At the bottom in the center is the team logo, which should be safe to overlap the edge of the photo there and not cover up too much of the action. Flanking the logo is the team abbreviation on the left and player position on the right. The 3-letter abbreviation is a thing I’ve tinkered with on a few designs but it’s definitely a placeholder here. Honestly, I just needed something on the opposite side of the position to keep the symmetry going. I love the rest of the design so much, I wasn’t going to let a little detail like that derail things.

2021 Clubhouse_COLE_BACK.jpg

The back mirrors the front pretty closely with the tabs lining up the same on both sides. There’s more of the primary color here to make room for the player bio next to his mug shot. I trimmed the career stats down to just the most recent 5 seasons. My reasoning here is this isn’t the flagship set and I’d have to sacrifice a lot of other design options just to accommodate more columns of numbers. And really, I don’t need more obstacles standing between me and a finished design.

Overall, there’s something very pleasing to me about this design. Something about the basic-ness speaks to me in a “well duh, why isn’t this already a thing?” kind of way. Big solid colors are throwback to cards of the past, but somehow this isn’t all that hokey (to my eyes at least).

10 Years of Spirit Trading Cards

I’m not sure how it didn’t dawn on me before now but I’ve been doing these fake cards long enough to have made 10 years worth of Spirit base designs. This fake card company has had its ups and downs along the way. Years where I made dozens of unique base, insert, parallel designs as well as years where I pumped out close to the bare minimum to keep this whole thing afloat. A lot of that has to do with life in general as well as the ebbs and flow of my passion for baseball and the collecting world. Lately I’ve found myself spending more time tweaking other stuff rather than spending time on wholly new designs. Perhaps the inspiration tank is running low. Nevertheless, I still love designing cards and plan on doing it in some capacity so long as I have the time.

That said, I thought it’d be nice to have all 10 of the Spirit base designs in one place to see the journey a little more clearly.

Seeing the progression from the 2012 Belt to the 2020 Margot, I can honestly say that none of them are embarrassing (which was definitely a fear). Is there room for improvement? Oh, most definitely. Are a few of them similar and/or derivative? You betcha. Could you rearrange the order without them looking drastically out of place? Probably. Am I proud of them? Without a doubt.

I’d love to see these ranked like one of those polls/lists/tournaments that pop up from time-to-time discussing Topps and their 70 different base designs. It would definitely be more objective since there aren’t biases like childhood nostalgia or print technology advances to cloud people’s choices. Maybe I’ll take the time put something like that together.

Power Alley Oop

While baseball and MLB is basically my only connection to the greater sports landscape these days, back in my youth in the early 90s, I was just as plugged into the NFL and NBA. So in addition to a ton of junk wax baseball cards, I had a good number of basketball and football cards. Even as I got older and my free time shifted from collecting to…other things, I was still a big NBA fan and hung around the hobby in that tent a little longer. Since my return to the hobby as an adult, I’ve been a 99% baseball collector, buying a pack of NBA or NFL cards here and there mostly just to check out the designs and such. And while those sparks haven’t been enough to reignite the flame in collecting other sports, I will forever hold a soft spot for that early 90s era of collecting.

A while back, for no reason in particular, it crossed my mind to make a baseball version of the 1991-92 NBA Hoops design. Unlike my project to redesign the Topps cards from the 00s, this was purely an exercise in mimicry. Bringing it to baseball was enough of a change for me. It came about so effortlessly, I decided to move on to 1992-93 Hoops. Then backwards to 1990-91 Hoops. Then I couldn’t stop.

Other than changing the NBA Hoops logo (MLB Hacks…like swings…), these are as precise as I could recreate the designs. There’s something about the progression from year to year that really gives me the warm fuzzies. No huge shifts between years, just building off of what came before and making changes/improvements to set them apart. It’s something I’d LOVE to see with Topps flagship designs these days.

I’m not sure how much of it is nostalgia, but I consider all four of these designs to be really solid when looking through an objective lens. Even something as simple as having a shape mimicking the basketball lane/free throw area is perfectly suited. No need for shiny effects to compensate for less-than-solid composition.

Where NBA Hoops had really hit its stride on the design side and figured out what exactly the set was year after year, the opposite could be said for Fleer. Just like on the baseball side, Fleer put out one of the most notoriously ugly designs in 1991. Not much can be said on its behalf. But man, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

After tackling the Hoops suite, that 1991-92 Fleer design came calling and I could not resist that siren song. Reconstructing the design was a fun little exercise — one I thought may soften my criticism and warm my opinion of the set. Alas, my assessment remains hard and cold. I still enjoyed the hell out of it. So much that I took care of the less-offensive 1990-91 Fleer design. At the time, I had considered the Hoops and Fleer sets that year to be equals. Looking back now, I can see how the 90-91 Fleer was a quasi-knockoff of the 89-90 Hoops look. I wonder if they heard that feedback at the time and the 90-91 move was a drastic one to establish a difference between the two sets. Or maybe they were just rollin’ differently at Fleer back then. As you can see, the following year’s set is a solid argument that was the case.

I did have to make a change to the 1992-93 Fleer design since one of the prominent elements they used was the pimpled basketball surface. The closest I could come for baseball was a really leathered baseball texture. I think it fulfills its purpose here. Seeing the chronology of all for designs side-by-side up there, it really accentuates how abruptly Fleer turned the page for the 1993-94 design. After going ALL OUT the previous two years, they came with a “less is more” approach in 1993-94. Even as a kid, I could perceive the shift from loud and almost childish to something more cool and confident in its restraint. As a designer now, I could call it lazy as it almost exclusively leans on Photoshop’s “outer glow” effect. But I’ll instead give them credit for knowing when to say when. And honestly, there’s something to be said for another designer doing something I would shoot down in the brainstorming processes and having it actually turn out pretty successful.

I should probably make a note about the Flipz name I went with to replace Fleer on these. Trying to stick with an f-word that wasn’t much longer presented a bit of a challenge. Between bat flips and glove flips, there’s enough baseball parlance to sell me on it. Plus we’re flipping sports here. Hate me for the Z if you want, but it was better than “Flips” to my eyes.

So after doing four cards for two different product lines, I feel satisfied enough to not delve any further into this exercise. For now. (I mean, Skybox….)

2021 Pennant

Now that I’ve finished wading through Topps’ designs from the Aughts, it’s time to reveal some new original designs. After posting the Spirit flagship design and cards for each of the 30 teams, I’m scaling back a bit going forward, offering just a few cards per release. So, say hi to the 2021 Pennant design.

The Pennant release has been the “retro” Spirit set, calling back to design styles of the past without ripping them off wholesale. I’ve bounced around decades and eras so as to not be too repetitive. Honestly, I can’t pinpoint the era I’m going for here, just more of a general “old” feel. The key is simplicity as I’ve kept the “design” to a minimum with plain but bold text at the bottom for the name and team. In the corners at the top are corresponding pennants with the Pennant logo and the player position. The most notable feature of the design is the photo treatment. What I’ve done is ramp up the contrast, remove the actual colors from the photos and replaced it with painted simple, solid color shapes. There is still some noise and black values to fill in the details, keeping it from looking quite so illustrated. Of the three here, the Brandon Lowe card is the best in my eyes, mostly thanks to the solid green background.

Here’s the back of the Lowe card. They’re black-and-white with the design mimicking the front. With just 3 seasons under his belt, I was able to fit Lowe’s full career (simplified) stats on here, though that probably wouldn’t be the case for a more seasoned veteran. This is also an opportunity to include the new MLBPA logo for the first time for me.

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.