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1969 Topps Football

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BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
There's nothing like fooling around with customs to make one think deeper about a card design or an entire set. When you look through an entire set and start trying to apply the designs, you quickly bump into the same challenges that dogged the original designers and start to understand why they made certain decisions and how the set evolved. Topps 1969 football set is a good example.

At a high level, the cards feature a player image with the background cropped out mounted on a solid colored background, with an identification bar at the bottom containing the usual name, position, and team city and name. The team logo also appears straddling the identification bar. Some cards are full bleed, meaning the solid colored background runs edge to edge, while others have a white frame around the background. If you guessed these cards are from different series, you are right. Series one had full bleed. Series two had the white frame.

Leroy_Kelly.jpg . John_Brodie.jpg

One of the oddities in this design is the way the player image is cropped inside the solid background, which makes it look like the player was cropped, rather than looking like the player image was framed. The Dave Wilcox card provides a particularly obvious example of how odd this cropping looks.

Dave_Wilcox.jpg

The style doesn't make much sense from an artistic standpoint, but if you think about mass production, you can probably guess the reason. Cards were printed on large sheets and then cut into individual cards. Having a solid color around the border, whether a full bleed background or a white frame, provided tolerance for cards to be less obviously wrong when the cuts were off. There would be no tolerance for off centered cuts if the player photos ran all the way to the edge. A sample from an uncut sheet confirms that theory.

Uncut_sample.png

You can see the Wilcox card (upside down) in the middle of the yellow row, so the cropping appears to be padding for off centered cuts. I'm guessing someone at Topps saw the results and didn't like them, hence the change to the white frame approach in series two. There were other subtle changes as well. In series one (LeRoy Kelly), the first name is centered above the last name, but the last name is left justified to the card, leaving a large white space between the names and the team logo. In series two (John Brodie), the first name is still centered above the last name, but the last name is centered in the white space between the edge of card and the logo. Overall the series two design feels like it makes more sense since both names are now center justified. Perhaps if both the first and last names had been left justified, one could argue that they were a counterweight to the logo, but that would still leave a lot of white space in the middle of the card.

Topps approach to football and basketball cards during this era was often underwhelming. It felt like they were ten years behind Topps' baseball designs, as if they were farmed out to a junior employee. Variations in the background color and logo placement (some are actually on the left) could be defended as part of the design, but the information presentation was inconsistent, too. In the 1969 football set, team names and positions are often truncated, sometimes in different ways even for the same position on the same team.

DB1.jpg . DB2.jpg . DB3.jpg

Topps brought this design back in 2013 with some changes. The obvious change was coloring the entire frame to indicate retail affiliation with Target (red) and Walmart (blue). A more subtle change was left justifying the first name, last name, and team name to present a more consistent look than the centered names, albeit with more white space in the middle.

Red_Target.jpg . Blue_Walmart.jpg . Green.jpg

I'm personally not a fan of creating relatively arbitrary variations to promote scarcity, but I don't make my living printing or selling cards.

Thanks!
 
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BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
Had to remove team city from the identification bar so that team name and position would fit without truncation.

2019_CLE_Baker_Mayfield.jpg . 2019_CLE_Kareem_Hunt.jpg . 2019_CLE_Odell_Beckham_Jr.jpg

This is how it starts...
 

BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
2019_JAX_Nick_Foles.jpg 2019_DET_Matthew_Stafford.jpg 2019_OAK_Antonio_Brown.jpg

Next logical step would be to produce a proof set of one card per team to flush out any required changes prior to mass production.

For example, DETROIT LIONS * RUNNING BACK fit fine across the bottom of the identification bar, but CLEVELAND BROWNS * RUNNING BACK didn't, which explains all the truncated team cities, team names, and positions in the original 1969 issue, and the subsequent decision to drop team city in the 2013 insert design.

So yeah, I already need to rework those Jaguars and Lions cards, but luckily only a few of them, and the hardest part, which is trimming out the backgrounds, doesn't need to be reworked.

I think I'm going to end up talking myself into doing a full set of these, unless the proofs are just too ugly.
 
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BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
Making steady progress on proof set. Need to finish at least one player from each team before locking in colors.

2019_Football_Proof.jpg
 

BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
2019_Classic_Football.jpg

Proof set completed. Tweaking logo sizing a bit to make up for different shapes. May yet switch a few background colors.
 

BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
Thanks! More to come.

Currently working on the less visually exciting part of the process, trying to piece together the rosters. I did a football set last season with 18 players per team, which is a big number. Way too early to line them all up as we still have the draft and more offseason deals ahead, but wanted to at least get a start on updates based on recent transactions.

Excel.jpg

I can share one visually interesting part of the process. Here's an example of Aaron Rodgers on every background color in the set.

Rodgers_Rainbow.jpg

The dark green of the Packers jersey works well against several of the "Day-Glo" backgrounds, particularly the higher contrast colors rather than yellow and green.

My working theory here is the given the under designed (lack of design) identification bar, the garish backgrounds are the primary design element of this set and should be celebrated as such.

Could be worse. Ever seen the super glossy football inserts from 1970?

Super_Glossy_1970.jpg

"Far out, man." - The Dude
 

BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
I've thought about doing a redemption set for the Super Glossies next year, but there were no real design elements beyond the ugly gradients.

2020_Andy_Dalton.jpg 2020_Ben_Roethlisberger.jpg 2020_Cam_Newton.jpg 2020_NEW_Tom_Brady.jpg 2020_NOR_Drew_Brees.jpg

I can't imagine doing more than a limited "insert" set to explore the concept.
 

BostonIdol

New member
Mar 8, 2019
193
2
Six cards per day should put me on pace to finish a 576 card set around the 4th of July. Anyone following along? Any feedback so far?
 

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