A Hair Off Square   custom cards

Joakim Soria 2006 Topps custom card; the 5th picture if you search for "Joakim Soria Card" on google images.

Custom cards are getting some respect by Google images. I search for Joakim Soria a lot on the internet looking for pictures for my “History of Joakim Soria” project. I happened to search for “Joakim Soria card” on Google images and was surprised to see several of my own cards there. Not only that but a couple of my colleges are high in the search results as well.

For an example I will give the results of the first 57 results. They are staggering to me. Goose Joak holds down the number 1 and 2 search results. Goose has a total of 11 cards in the top 57 including 4 in the top 10. I place 2 in the top 10 (numbers 5 and 8 ) and 5 overall cards. Another custom designer (CSD) also has 5 results in the top 57.

Overall of the top 57 results there are 22 Joakim Soria custom cards. Of those same 57 results only 18 are actual Joakim Soria cards. Impressive in my opinion for the custom card designers out there.

Now visit these sites:

Goose Joak Custom Cards

CSD Custom Cards

1952 Topps, Mickey Mantle’s rookie card year. One of the most important cards of all time. This is Soria’s version of that year. I intentionally chose a picture that was a pose and manipulated it to look blurry and noisy. The pale yellow background on the Royals logo is intentionally ugly as well. I don’t really like the way the stars came out on the box around the name but it matches the original set so I left them as they were.

Here is another card making multiple appearances on my site. I originally posted this as a custom card of the day but it needs to be posted in this category as well. I am trying to get all of the cards that have made an appearance on this site in the past in this category so everything will be fresh.

This is a great looking card. Nice picture and a very solid card design as well. 1974 Topps is probably a design that I will make more samples of in the future. For now here is Joakim, enjoy.

“History of Joakim Soria” #5. This is Joakim Soria’s rookie year for baseball cards. He had an actual card this year, it is the first time I have re-made an existing Soria card in my “Historty of Jokim Soria” series. I like this card a lot but I don’t know if it is better than his actual Topps rookie card.

As I have mentioned a couple times on this site, 1971 Topps is my favorite card set. 2007 Topps is a tribute to this set in many ways. It is the second time that Topps has ever done a black border being the main similarity. Another similarity is that the players signature appears on the front of the card.

I had decided not to do these signatures but changed my mind before ever posting a year that had the feature. I know that a few years have had signatures and I will add a signature when appropriate now that I have re-created it. This is a good looking card, the powder blue jersey really looks good with the black border. The signature gets lost a little in the photo because of the dark spots but it still ties the card together a little and I am glad I decided to add it.

Here is a “History of Joakim Soria” card that has been posted on my site before. When I posted it I raved about the design of 1983 Topps. I still will take a second to gush about it. I love the design, right down to the inset circle picture. It is just a great looking card.

The funny thing about how much I like the design of this card is that I never really thought about how much I liked it until I started doing my custom cards. I had to re-create it and it was tough but not near as bad as some I have done(I just did 1997 Topps and it wasn’t easy) I think my favorite sets of all time may now be:

1. 1971 Topps

2. 1984 Donruss

3. 1983 Topps

Here is the next installment of my History of Joakim Soria series. 1976 Topps is one of those classic cards. It has a simple yet comfortable design. It has large area for the picture which I am a huge fan of. The only “fancy” part of the card is the ambiguous picture of the position player in the lower left hand corner. This is something that was really only done on 1973 Topps first then again in the 1976 set.

I previously posted a 1972 Topps card of Soria for my first “History of Joakim Soria” card, this is a newer card to match it.

2006 Topps is most noteworthy for the Alex Gordon card that wasn’t supposed to be in the set. If you are interested you can read about it here. The design of this card is one I really don’t like much, you can’t tell from my design but there was a lot of silver foil on the cards; something I am not a fan of.

This is the last year that Soria didn’t have a real card in the set. I have decided to re-do all of his current cards however to complete the project.