A Hair Off Square   custom cards

“The History of Joakim Soria” is back with another one of the cards from the bland years of Topps. In the late 1990s and early 2000s it seemed Topps was in a bit of a rut. They weren’t cranking out bad designs, just a little bland and not very unique. You can see on this 1998 card the addition of transparent borders to try to liven the card up, what it does is make it busy and distracts from the picture, something I feel you never want to do. The name block has the team’s logo repeated several times in the background, another thing to make the card just look busy. I do like how the actual name of the player runs into the solid box possessing the team’s name though. My last comment; another solid gold border; yuck. Overall, not a good design by Topps.

Most of my re-creations of Topps cards are portrait cards. This one is a landscape card for a couple reasons: I want to represent certain years that did have sideways cards, not all of them did, I don’t think any base cards were sideways from 1972 – 1990. The second reason is some designs look nice in a landscape format. The last reason is simply I have pictures that won’t fit “up and down” on a card like this one.