Lead, Follow, Or Drop The Exclusive Contract

 Maybe I'm just old school, but this is a League Leader card:

In the next decade, they were similar...

And in the 80's...

Not sure what happened in the 90's.  They kinda went away.  Then in 2000, they did this:

OK, not bad.  Change it up a little.  Somewhere they quit featuring pitching victories.  But then we got back to normal.

And swung around to horizontal again...

Now they called 'em "Wins".  Continued on til 2016...

Then this happened.

 

The card on the right is not a League Leader card.  It's just like the one on the left with an extra title.

 

Same thing in 2018.  Single player base card with a small text addition.  (The white border is just bad cropping on my part.)

 

OK, now you're not even using different shots.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Over.

Skip forward to this year.  Same deal.  

The windup, quick tilt of the camera, the pitch...and an even SMALLER "League Leader" tag.

C'mon Topps.  Go back to something like this.  I put this together in a couple hours.

Oh yeah, and - extra bonus - you can read the text from more than a foot away!

BBA: 2021 Topps - Make It Better

 I think most of the world would like to leave out the "Topps" in my title and write a re-do to the entire year of 2020.  For now, we'll go with a tweak of the future flagship design as originated by Cards That Never Were.

I've got a few versions to throw at you, but this is the closest to the final product.  The original is just too busy, or I'm too old.  I don't need all the junk protruding into the image and covering it up in spots all over the place.

Let's see the original to compare.

The name is WAY too small.  Shades of the last few years of Topps football when they were seemingly trying to find the smallest font size tolerable.  And those bars on the lower left.  What are they for?  Nothing.

I shortened them up, cleaned them up and gave the rookie logo somewhere to anchor to instead of flotaing free in the corner.  And separated the position over to the other bar.

Replaced the honeycomb from 1987 Donruss behind the middle with the 70th Anniversary of Whatever Facet of Cards This Year across there.  It could almost stand to squeeze the picture at the waist and widen the area for the logo so you could at least see it fully.

Skootched the team logo to the center of the bar a bit too.

I kinda like this typeface for the name better on the light colored bar, but it doesn't work for the position - needs to be bolder and more opaque over there.  You can see that I had the position and variable rookie logo swapped originally.  Figured the empty frame is better for the RC logo since it's only on 50 or 60 percent of the base cards.  (OK, I know, I'm being cynical).

An earlier, and slightly more generic name font.  The lowest blue stripe has been left unfinished.

This is what it looks like when you duplicate the logo before fading effects.

None of these are my final version.  They're all still unbalanced.  Something needs to go in the upper area, but I don't know what.  And it would be interesting to try and make some other players to see how their names fit.  Adell's is really short.

But that's my take on it.  I'm not expecting to see much of these in real life here at the Collective.  Waiting for Allen & Ginter to supplant my annual flagship build.

Ugliest Card Nominees

I've been trying to think of a submission for Baseball Every Night's Ugly Card Contest.  I figured there's got to be a couple cards that just make me think "Egad, that's hideous!" at first glance.  My first criteria would be horrible designs.  Trouble is, if I hate the design of a set, I'm not going to collect it, so I won't have any.  So I went to my tradeables box and started in the early 90's, since that's the most likely source of hideousness by default.   I came up with three candidates.  Here they are in order from least to most terrible.

#3 - 1995 Score #115 Bud Black

Not one of my favorite designs in the first place, mostly because of the default 90's teal color plowing through the basepath dirt contrasted by the violet blue namestrip.  A ghastly combination.  And then the photograph is rather unique, but almost obscures the featured player completely.  It's a lot worse in hand - the scan emphasizes the focus on the face.  A few feet to the right would have framed it a lot better without losing the intended depth.


#2 - 1998 Pacific Aurora Pennant Fever Red Mo Vaughn.

Now I generally like Pacific in all their foily over the top gaudiness, but these are just bizarre.  This is actually an insert set - and a parallel one at that - of an unusual base set.

This is the base product.  Interesting concept, but the position line is way too big, as is the city text.  Thin those out and expand the action pic and you might have something.

But back to Mo.  The regular inserts are actually gold or bronze (can't really tell from the scans on TCDB).  This red parallel series keeps the random colored stripes through the middle of the background echo picture (the what? - I'll show you) but washes it all in blood red.

See here, I've outlined the embossed "echo picture", which I define as a second image identical to the featured picture.  They are almost always identical and totally redundant.  It's OK, but lazy to put the same image of a player on the back as the front, but I really hate echo pictures on the fronts of cards, especially when they're distorted.

 

   

 

But that's the least of the APF's design woes - where does the blue and yellow come from?  That isn't Boston's colors, nor do all of Boston's (or any team's) players have the same colors in this set.  Plus, what is the purpose of the team-lettered stripe?  No idea.  But it looks awful against the uniform and the red background.  Not to mention the Player's Association logo which jumped up front for some reason too....

The back doesn't help much either.  The scheme changes to green.

At least the angle of the gold band (complete with Windows logos at each end...???) is at the same angle as the useless color band on the front.  The logos repeat.  Bonus points for readable text, though.

#1 - 2012 Topps Classic Walk-offs #CW-3 Johnny Bench  Or pretty much all of them.

I finished my master-ish set of 2012 Topps a while after they came out.  I've never added these inserts.  This is Topps' most blatant example of starting with the auto-relic hit and working backwards (quickly and lazily) by subtraction to get the base insert.  I reviewed the 2012 inserts and offered my upgrades to their designs.

All of these have at least two echo pictures.  A few have three.  THREE!  The same image re-cropped and shown three times on one card.  I have to pause to compose myself.  Not sure whether to laugh, cry or scream.  Then in Bench's case, the team logo, which occupies the space reserved for the relic swatch, is (accurately) plain white.  Therefore the only color on the whole card is on one quarter of the total area.  Stuck between the parallel lines that make it look like those sliding chalkboard panels that move in front of each other in older school buildings.  the bottom picture on the right 2/3 of the front is faded so that the signature that you didn't get will show better.  Or remind you that you didn't pull the signed version.

I had to make an improved version again.

Ahh, much better.

I visualized my "ugliest card" to be something with a lot more gaudy foil against sickening color combinations with a badly cropped photo, but this will do.  These are the cards that I can think of the quickest that I can't stand the most.  A couple times I've seen them cheap, and considered finishing the master set just for the sake of completism, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.  Maybe if I find the whole set in a dime box at a show somewhere down the line.

Designs Across the Lines

Back in the mid 1990's, many of the card companies would use the same basic design formats for their main sets of the major sports.  This was, of course, back when several companies were producing cards for each of the four major sports.  (The "good times").

For example, in 1995, Topps did this:

   

 

Baseball, Football, and Basketball were all the white frame, gold foil script names and smaller all-caps positions and team names highlighted by team color jagged stripes across the bottom and up one side.  I thought it clever to use Deion for both sports he played, especially since the colors match.

Fleer Ultra did all four sports....

   

And so did Upper Deck.  Their design in a bit minimalist in that it's really only the name arc'ed across a full bleed picture.

Now, I'm more of the opinion that original designs for the four sports are better than the same one.  Usually because there are design elements specifice to the particular sport.  Gloves and bats in baseball, gridiron lines and helmets in football, etc.  But these designs don't use any of that and therefore can support all four sports well.

So can any modern designs carry over into other sports?  in a (more) perfect card world, any of the present companies could produce cards for other sports besides those that they have exclusive contracts for.  What would their products look like?

Let's get out the old Paint Shop program and find out, shall we?

2017 Topps (P)unt football:

2015 GQ football:

 

2014 A&G Hockey:

More to come...?

The Collective Gets An Upgrade

Been noticing that my previous incarnation of this blog didn't have a lot of the functionality of most of the other sites I read.  So I took a leap and dove into Blogger's Theme upgrade.

The title is going to change into a more Borg-ian image when I get a chance to muck something together.

The colors are still evolving.  [Update: I've changed it a few times today already.]  I want dark and sinister but readable, and still have the photos stand out.

At least I have the "older posts", blogroll, and link functions.

Let me know how it looks on your devices.

Check back all week to see the evolution.