This Post is Part of an Ongoing Feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.
When you think of Leaf Limited, what comes to mind? For me it’s foil. Shiny, unscannable, easily-damaged foil. The base cards of Leaf Limited, while beautiful, share a quality with sets like ’71 Topps in that it’s tough to find a mint specimen undinged by life as a cardboard rectangle. They’re just fragile.
When you think of Leaf Limited, what comes to mind? For me it’s foil. Shiny, unscannable, easily-damaged foil. The base cards of Leaf Limited, while beautiful, share a quality with sets like ’71 Topps in that it’s tough to find a mint specimen undinged by life as a cardboard rectangle. They’re just fragile.
You may or
may not also think of lines which seem to be a major element in every one of
their designs. That may sound a little vague since everything is made of lines,
but Leaf Limited designs tend to gravitate towards clusters of horizontal lines
that move together. The layouts were also very symmetrical in the first part of
the timeline.
The last thing you may think of is an aesthetic that, while modern and sharp, still exudes beauty like a flat little four-cornered Faberge
egg. The designs tend to be a little more forward-thinking than
other brands that focus on a classic look for their high-end offerings, but Leaf Limited stays pretty. That's not easy.
Here's every Leaf Limited design in order:
1994:
 |
| 1994 Leaf Limited #66 |
Lots of
precedents are being set this year, some of which stuck around towards the end
of the timeline. One of my favorite things about Leaf Limited is that great
cursive “L” in the logo which appeared in either metallic foil or holofoil on
the first few sets. If you ask me, it never looked better than in these
first three designs.
Another
feature more striking in the beginning of the timeline is the
prominently-featured parallel lines used to create a symmetrical focal point on
the card. The lines would stay a major design theme for most of the timeline –
the symmetry would not.
Lots of
holofoil and that great big centered team logo are great accouterments to a
strong debut base design. I’m also a fan of the thick border and nameplate font
which we would see again in the ’96 set and also in ’95 Leaf flagship, a
personal favorite.
1995:
 |
| 1995 Leaf Limited #118 |
The most
different of all the Leaf Limited designs, this base set is bathed in team
color, shiny bits, and general character. The stately parallel lines and
complete inundation in holofoil are the dominant characteristics this year. The
gold foil logo is my favorite one in the timeline as is the great vertical
team name in a kind of script I’ve never seen on another card before or since.
I’m also a big proponent of the modern, tastefully-spaced nameplate. It doesn’t
hurt that Griffey got an especially great photo for his base card this year.
For all those reasons, when I hear someone say “Leaf Limited,” this is the card
that springs to mind.
1996:
 |
| 1996 Leaf Limited #11 |
More modern
and less pretty than its predecessor, this one sports three entirely different
kinds of foil. We’ve got holofoil up top and gold metallic foil below with the
whole enchilada wrapped in silver foil card stock. While I prefer the brand
logo from last year’s design, this one is presented nicely. There are much better uses for parallel lines than
the vertical “prison” look, but those babies framed within the thick left and right
side borders give an air of stateliness to the card. Plus they make it look
taller. Kinda.
For most
Donruss sets the break in the timeline happens after 1998, but this one is
different. In 1997 someone made the call to nix Leaf Limited and rebrand it as a new-from-the-ground-up brand called Donruss Limited. The new set was so convoluted and weirdly-engineered that it
failed after only two years. Why they made this move is a mystery to me, but I
have to assume based on what they did release in lieu of another Leaf Limited
that they were trying to create a whole new kind of set. They sure did, too, and
less than two years later they filed for bankruptcy.
By the time
2001 rolled around a lot of Donruss brands were being resurrected by their new
owners, Playoff, and for some reason Leaf Limited was one of them. They hadn’t
existed for five years at this point. Why now? Why this one? It’s almost like
Playoff was trying to undo the damage done with the introduction of Donruss
Limited and get the brand back to where it was just before the downward spiral.
Enough conjecture – here’s what Playoff did with Leaf Limited:
2001:
 |
| 2001 Leaf Limited #11 |
My favorite
design under the Playoff banner and the first asymmetrical design in the
timeline, these puppies are bold. Check out the striking font and
extensive team dual-coloration (it looks particularly cool on cards for the
Astros and Diamondbacks). They also kept the parallel lines – seemingly the
very same ones used in the ’95 design – and worked them into a fun new spiral
shape around the logo. There seems to have been a lot of thought put into this
year’s design, and it turned out solid. Well done, Playoff.
Despite a
great effort in 2001, there was no Leaf Limited in 2002. I have no idea why. My
guess is that they spent months creating the greatest card set of all time, and
someone spilled coffee on the final proofs and the designers said, “Screw it.
We’re not doing that all over again.” On we go to 2003:
2003:
 |
| 2003 Leaf Limited #61 #/999 |
Ladies and gents, the first genuinely limited Leaf Limited set. All the base cards are serial numbered from here on out, so it's no longer just a fancy brand name. The lines
are once again oriented around the logo here, but they are of a shorter,
thicker variety like those found on traffic signs. The massive vertical
nameplate feels like it was tacked on as an afterthought; and while this very
blog uses a lot of Times New Roman in its title, I just don’t buy it on most
baseball cards (I said most - '92 Studio rocks Times New Roman like a beast). It’s not a particularly ugly design, but it’s also not
particularly memorable.
2004:
 |
| 2004 Leaf Limited #81 #/749 |
This year we got a return to the symmetry of the 90’s designs. I really like the
low-profile nameplate and team logo over a field of extreme-zoom team logo, but
there’s one thing missing from the design this year: parallel lines. We get a
few perpendicular lines splitting corners around the diamond-shaped logo, but
that’s it. A staple of Leaf Limited design elements is gone forever.
Leaf
doubled-up a lot of the checklist this year, so there are actually two
Griffeys in the base set. The other is card #173. It is identical apart from the photo, blurb, and card number. For the purposes of the
Timeline I am only showing the first base card.
2005:
 |
| 2005 Leaf Limited #102 #/699 |
They brought
back the lines but the uniformity is lost. Now it leans more towards that
lines-for-the-sake-of-lines thing that Upper Deck did so much. It’s a
good-looking card, though, and not altogether out of place in the timeline; but the randomness of the lines is just not very Leaf Limited to me. This has always been a set based on orderliness and symmetry. Even when the symmetry was removed in the '01 design there was still a balance to the layout. That's pretty much gone. Still, this is cool card, and I love the simple, mid-mounted nameplate.
That is
where the Leaf Limited timeline ends. Since then Panini has acquired Playoff
and, therefore, Donruss and Leaf. We’ve seen them taking these defunct
brands and running with them back into the collector card market in recent years,
but among the first of their unlicensed offerings was a very bizarrely-dated
(for baseball, anyway) 2011-12 Panini Limited set. They even kept the logo more
or less the same though they used a more stylized “L.” There was no Griffey in
that base set, but he did make it into a few inserts.
__________________________________________________________________________
Whether you like the designs or not, you have to respect that this brand did have a unique identity as the "modern beauty" of cardboard. The design progression makes perfect sense, and the cards have just enough in common with one another from year to year to unify the timeline. The first few sets are great, too, particularly that beautifully-assembled ’95 design. I didn’t even show you the card backs. Those are a real treat, all gussied-up with holofoil and great layouts.
I should also mention that the quality of the printing stock only got better set-to-set. Towards the end it's almost like plastic which I mean in a good way. The quality was high. Despite that, I still feel like I could damage the mirrored surface with a light thumb graze.
All that being said, I don’t really have an
emotional connection with any of these sets. Frankly, back in my collecting
heyday I resented them for their exclusivity, price, and inclusion of
innumerable impossible-to-find Griffeys. I’m still a little raw about it. Really,
they could have retired the brand after the ’96 set and I wouldn’t feel any
different.
Here again are all the Leaf Limited designs at once and in order:
Nice recap and analysis of the design. I don't think I have ever seen the 2004 design. My lack of emotional connection to the brand mirrors yours, but in retrospect they are some nice looking cards.
ReplyDeleteGood stuff. Those first 2-3 years were really solid.
ReplyDelete