Other than when I’m remixing/tweaking previous designs, I try to do my best at being original when making new cards. Sure, there are a lot of intentional nods and references to other designs, but I usually shy away from blatantly lifting someone else’s work and calling it “my” design. But when I saw this tweet from MLB on Twitter, I couldn’t help but think what a good card design it would make.
It’s a nice presentation of two players on two different teams showing them on equal footing. Though I didn’t do it on last year’s set, I have utilized a 2-up design for the Award Winners insert in past years. This seemed like the perfect way to interpolate this graphic into a card.
Putting the AL and NL Gold Glove and Silver Slugger winners at each position back-to-back fits perfectly. I designated the AL side as blue and the NL side as red, screening back the league logos in the big color boxes on the bottom. I really liked how the original graphic had the skyline/trees in there but I don’t think every MLB city lends itself to that conceit as well as NY and LA do. Other than adding the player names at the bottom and some gold/silver to the scheme, it follows the “inspiration” pretty closely. I did run into the issues of finding photos that fit together as well as the Cole/Trout combo. The Devers/Riley card works beautifully but when it came to finding fielding photos for the Gold Glove guys, it was a bit more challenging since great fielding isn’t always well-confined to a vertical frame. Minor quibbles.