Trading Cards & Packaging
I grew up collecting trading cards. Not baseball cards, mind you, but movie cards—Star Wars, Indiana Jones, even Alien had a set that came with low-grade bubblegum. The mid-90s had a comics craze that spread to other media and trading cards were swept up as well, with various flashy printing techniques to give them something more unique.
My job was to take 150 illustrations of heroes & villains, give them a dynamic type designs and array of borders and corresponding backs that held their info/stats. It was a beast of a project for my inexperienced brain and yet a ton of fun.
DC Legends ‘95
This set started with a specific challenge: Make a low-cost set look “Premium”. Low cost meant single-cut, so when all of the cards were printed, they were all on a single sheet of card stock. This meant every card had to have a seamless edge to the one next to it so no matter where the cutter sliced, it didn’t look weird. Usually this meant a flat color or a simple flat pattern, but I tried something different: Illustrated borders with depth that felt like part of the world the character was in. More work for the production artists (me and a co-worker) but a step up from the norm.
Well the designs were so well-recieved by SkyBox and DC that they decided to spend the extra money for a “Premium” set —metallic foil, embossing, special varnishes, with snappy-named “Powerchrome” that gave the cards shine and some depth.
It was also the early days of 3D tools, but I was enamored with them so I used them on all the type (and a few other elements) and making print-resolution renders on early Macs became dicey as deadlines loomed. I think the results were pretty unique and came together really well.
Fleer Ultra Spider-Man Promos & Packaging
3D webs, everywhere. It was a time when artists were leaning into Spidey’s webbing and really making it a design element in the comics, and this was my contribution. And lots of typefaces.
