Design Timeline: Fleer Metal Universe

This post is part of an ongoing feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.

Metal Universe was introduced when Fleer was owned by Marvel; therefore, it’s only natural that the product of this partnership be a set that depicted our favorite players as heroes and villains in a fantasy comic book “universe.”  Where illustration may otherwise have looked cartoonish, Fleer instead used etched foil in the card art.  This gave a more sophisticated air to what was essentially a product for kids of all ages.

On that note the set was unbelievably fun and awesome, or at least it was for the first couple of years.  As with most sets, the concept fell apart and eventually the product lost its identity.  At least the inserts stayed consistently awesome.

Let’s talk about the name for a moment: Metal Universe.  This name has two sides with separate meanings.  Metal in the context of this brand means shiny and textured; Universe means comic book fantasy themes.  There are years when the brand leans more towards one meaning of this brand name than the other (which is fine) and even one year when half the brand’s namesake gets completely ignored (not fine).

Here is every Fleer Metal Universe base card design in order:

1996:

The first year of Metal was also one of their best years design-wise, and it featured etching unlike anything that had been done before.  Fleer used a ludicrous amount of stippling and hatching to create exciting shapes, textures, creatures and planets as well as cool fire and water effects.  Even with all that foil work, the cards remained colorful.  There is some repetition of themes among the base cards but not an obnoxious amount.  The nameplate below is shiny and simple enough, and the brand logo is ornate and cool.  Amazingly, that logo would remain relatively unchanged throughout the run of the brand.  Homerun.

1997:

Where the ’96 set was a homerun, this one is a grand slam.  While its forerunner was comprised of a dozen or so different fantasy themes, the ’97 set had very few repeats in that area (I stopped counting themes at thirty).  Every card feels completely different.  This set also boasts the brightest colors as the foil etching has evolved from simple stippling and hatching to more complex patterns and the inclusion of non-etched areas that can reflect more light.  The nameplate didn’t change all that much outside of a little shadow added to the lettering for impact which I really like.  

It seems to me like Fleer/Marvel chose a design team that really cared about the product they were making, and then they gave that team carte blanche to create as awesome a set as they wanted.  Just thumbing through the base cards it seems like the design process must have taken weeks and required a ton of imagination.  Anyone who is even mildly into creative visual design would probably have a blast working on this project.  Fantastic.

1998:

I really hope you enjoyed those last two designs because it’s all downhill from here on out.  This is the only Metal release not to feature foil etching apart from on the small portrait on the bottom.  Instead they took this flat, dark, impossible-to-scan foil and added illustration to the background that was completely without the boldness of the previous years.  You might also note the complete lack of color.  Well, you’re right - even viewed in real life and not in scan form, the colors are washed out in darkness.  At least it maintains the slightest bit of the brand's original aesthetic, unlike….

1999:

This set is all Metal and no Universe.  They added a huge name plate with big iron rivets then filled the rest of the background with rough-looking cross-hatched foil that doesn’t reflect quite as much light, thereby offsetting the shininess of the name plate.  So what do you do once you’ve filled up a third of the card with nameplate?  You throw the name on there again, of course.  I like the font, actually, and the cards don’t look that bad overall; but I can’t overlook the fact that somebody humped the bunk here.

Don’t get me wrong - I get (and even kind of like) the aesthetic they were going for, but it’s not the aesthetic of Metal Universe.  What they’ve done here is create an entirely new brand identity.  If you take a banana split and slowly change it bit by bit into a cheese sandwich, at some point in that process you’ve got to stop calling it a banana split, bro.  Take the Metal Universe logo off and call it Fleer Steel or something. 

2000:

It seems Fleer took my advice and removed the word “Universe” from the brand name this year, opting instead to focus on the brand’s use of etched foil as opposed to fantastic backgrounds (one year too late).  They even did one better and took the Fleer name off the product as well, instead designating Metal as a Skybox product.  Design-wise the effect of the etching here is cool but maybe a little too understated .  

For example, you can see pretty easily in the scan that there is a very slight spiral to the stippling in the background that follows the action of Junior’s swing.  This effect is mimicked to some degree on every base card with most cards having a simple bursting effect.  However, the effect is not as apparent when looking at the real card dead-on - It comes out a lot better in scans.  The result is a set of base cards that feel like a parallel for another set.

With that the Metal brand came to an end.

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I think these cards must have cost a fortune to design and print; but then the budget shrank as revenues from baseball cards fell off, and they had to cut back.  Still, I bet it was fun as hell sitting in a room with a bunch of comic book illustrators, finding interesting player poses and deciding what to do to make each card come to life.  If I could pick any set from the 90’s to have worked on, it would be ’97 Metal Universe.  That set is a masterpiece. 

The Metal Universe creative process was so far beyond that of “find picture, slap on nameplate, stamp on logo, wrap stack in Mylar, repeat.”  There was real originality there for a few years.  If I'm wrong about decreased revenues causing the decline in quality here, then it sucks that we lost a great brand to somebody’s preference of “Ooh, shiny.”  I would like to have seen this brand skew the opposite way - no metal, just real player photography superimposed and interacting with crazy fantasy worlds that might have been illustrated or even computer-generated.  They could have called it Fleer Marvel.  It could have been awesome.

Here's every Metal Universe (and plain ol' Metal) base card design:

Design Timeline: Studio

This post is part of an ongoing feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.

The focus of this set was clear from the beginning: give us a unique and intimate look at our favorite ballplayers in a way no baseball card had done before.  The result was a solid run of thirteen sets filled with great photography and a uniquely personal bent.  Almost half the sets didn't even have stat lines - just blurbs filled with cool personal tidbits about our favorite players.  And man, did we ever learn a lot in those first couple of years of Studio.  

For example, we learned that a lot of our favorite players are gangly and awkward.  Some are playful goofballs and some have weird hair.  Crooked smiles, unibrows, raccoon eyes, hairy knuckles - all the little imperfections that make our heroes human spring forth from the card and stab you in the eyeballs.  Studio got us nice and personal with intimate portraits of guys we usually only get to see only from the stands, and they did it awesomely with a lot of cool and clever designs.

Here’s every Studio base card design in order:

1991:

Here is Studio’s core concept in the raw.  While this is one of the better sets to come out of 1991, it is by far the most abrasive and occasionally off-putting of all the Studio sets.  The black and white portraits are clear and stark with lots of awkward and forced poses.  It’s a lot like ’92 Bowman in that there are so many hilarious cards it makes me want to collect the whole set.  And look at that backdrop: they were unapologetic about the fact that these were taken in a portrait studio like one found in a K-Mart or at a Glamour Shots.  Please don’t misconstrue any of what you just read as a complaint.

I like the simple layout of the card with the low-impact player name and team logo, and the Studio logo is cool - my only question is I don’t know what to call that color in the border.  Is that mauve?  Merlot, perhaps?  Whatever it is, it’s on every card and seems to work.  Despite all the weird things about this set, the packs are really fun to open.  A great inaugural design.

1992:

A highly stylized version of the ’91 set, this year they gave us color portraits and replaced the background with gritty black and white action shots in lieu of the Glamour Shots backdrop.  They also put the player name in a bigger, fancier font and gave us a new brand logo with a little more chutzpah.  No team logo this year, and the merlot of the previous year is replaced by a fancy gold tone border.  There are still a few goofy portraits in the set, but overall this is a reasonable and logical progression in design from ‘91 - no complaints.

1993:

This design consisted of a simple but engaging layout: player portrait over a full-bleed close-up of the team logo patch in the background.  The only elements outside of that are the holofoil signature and Studio logo.  Every card in the set is like the Griffey shown above: very simple, colorful, and fun.  One of my favorite sets of the decade.

1994:

Doing these design timelines has taught me that while I’m a sucker for holofoil printing and fancy script, when both are combined I turn into a total slut.  Studio gets another level of personal here by superimposing the player’s portrait over a mock-up of his home locker.  This draws you into the detail behind the player, a design element that Studio would revisit in the early 2000’s.  Overall this set is engaging and the cards look expensive.  Nice work…

1995:

I love this set despite its gimmickiness.  Actually, strike that - I love this set because of its gimmickiness.  While on the surface it strays from the close-and-personal portrait photography a bit, it is clear that they put a lot of thought into this design what with the raised lettering of the stat lines, the holofoil team logo, and the simulated magnetic strip on the back.  The whole cleverly-designed package looks even better on the plastic gold and platinum parallels.  As far as gimmicky designs go, I give this one a lot of…..credit? (sorry)

1996:

This set sports the first logo change since the ’92 set.  The layout consists of an action shot with a huge, card-sized portrait imposed between the player and the background.  There’s nothing especially unique or eye-grabbing about this design, and even the inclusion of a foil team logo doesn’t help very much.  Not bad, but this design is a bit of a snoozer.

1997:

Here is one of the designs that leaps to mind when I think of Studio - just a really well-done set of portraits.  The photography is fantastic with just the right amount of shadow and probably a little airbrushing in some of these guys’ cases.  There are no awkward poses outside of a handful of guys trying to look mean (lookin’ at you, Albert Belle; but all kidding aside, you are totally mean).  The border and background are attractive and unobtrusive as is the great font used in the player name and the single strip of team color along the bottom.  

Studio also made this set in an 8” x 10” portrait size so collectors can frame these the way you would a senior photo or a wedding portrait.  I would make fun of folks for doing that if I didn’t have one of Griffey on the wall as we speak (mine is autographed and in a plaque - so sue me).  The Press Proof parallels look especially cool in this set.

1998:

I think this is the weakest design in the timeline which makes sense as this is also the year Donruss went bankrupt.  Here they put a non-studio photograph over a washed-out action shot and separate them with a black outline which looks just awful next to that white border.  There’s a team-appropriate color fade along the bottom behind the name, but I don’t know why.  The name font is cool, but everything else about this card is a miss.  And a mess.  It's a messy miss.

Thus begins a two-year hiatus during which all the Donruss brands would get a redesign from their new owners, Playoff.  When all is said and done and the brands return to the market, Studio somehow comes out the best.

2001:

This is Playoff trying to push Studio further into the high end of the market market.  First, we get a new modern logo that also adds a hint of holofoil to every card.  The layout is similar to that of the ’93 set with a portrait over a stitched team logo, but here we get a thick white border and a prominent nameplate along the bottom in fancy fonts with spaced letters.  They also started using a super-thick new card stock making this the thickest Studio base card in the timeline.

This is a great-looking set, but it lacks some of the fun that made previous designs successful, a result of the designers embracing a cleaner, more high-end look.  It looks like a decent insert that happens to be called “Studio.”  I can’t fault Playoff though as this is the direction the designs seemed to be heading even before the bankruptcy.

2002:

Ah, the sudden and intense patriotism of post-9/11 America.  Every single base card in this set features Old Glory in the backdrop, even for the players who are not American.  There’s also an old black-and-white film reel of the each team’s city back there.  This may be the most fiercely patriotic base set ever made (’01 Donruss is up there, too), but it’s also the last set to feature studio portraits in lieu of standard card photography.  If you don’t like this set, the terrorists win.

Let’s kill two Studios with one description:

2003:

See 2004:

2004:

The backgrounds are the stars in both ’03 and ’04, showing Cincy’s Great American Ballpark backed by an afternoon cityscape in the former, and a colorfully-lit evening Cincy skyline in the latter.  While the studio portraits are gone for good, the photographs are still crystal-clear and high-quality in both years.  The nameplates are befuddlingly simple with a plain team logo.  I really like both the designs and can’t really fault them for repetition.  They both look great and are sufficiently different that I’m not going to whine.

2005:

If you look, this is the same perspective on the city as in ’04 but tinted red and bordered in a white fade on the top and bottom.  Junior is superimposed in black and white, but this portrait is not as clear as in years past which is kind of against the original idea of the Studio brand.  They’ve made it all about cityscapes, man - that wasn’t the plan.  If I wanted to see a Donruss card with a blurry, squinting Griffey I’d look at his ’89 rookie.  How about you guys make a new set called “Donruss Cityscapes” and leave my Studio alone?  

I may complain, but it’s still a damn good-looking design.  Sadly it was also Studio’s last.

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Studio put out some beautiful and uniquely personal cards during their surprisingly long life span.  Nearly all the designs are attractive and forward-thinking, and they really stuck with the brand’s aesthetic.  They also put out some great parallels and inserts over the years.  This is one brand I really miss.

Here's every Studio base card design in order:

January, 2015 addendum: Studio is back as an insert in 2014 Donruss Series 2, and it's actually pretty awesome! Go Check it out!

Design Timeline: Select

This post is part of an ongoing feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.

If you wanted fancy cards, you got Upper Deck or one of the super-premiums, budget willing.  If you wanted cheap, there was always Collector's Choice.  Somewhere in between was Select.  The boxes of packs at the store never seemed to get any emptier, but there were a few years when I genuinely loved the base card design.

Select was intended to be a high-end version of Score to occupy that spot in the market just below Pinnacle.  They really hit their design stride in '95 and '96, then fell victim to a questionable design reboot in '97 and fell by the wayside thereafter just before the release of their sixth set during the cardmageddon of 1998.

Here is every Select base card design from their first in 1993 to their last in 1997:

1993:

That green is not an attempt to be team-appropriate - all the base cards are green.  That's right: Select's inaugural offering is one of those weird monochromatic sets.  Luckily that green is a little more baseball-y than the reds and yellows of other notorious early-90's sets.  The design is vaguely reminiscent of a baseball field, but there's not a whole lot to it.  The set as a whole is saved by the solid photography.

1994:

This is the first of three years when Select's designs came exclusively in a horizontal orientation.  This design decision resulted in some entirely new, unique layouts that didn't need a vertical counterpart.  The year featured two full-bleed action photos separated by a thick gold bar showing the player name.  The smaller picture has a team-appropriate color tint.  The set as a whole is different and interesting, and there are a few gems of photography in this set, too.

1995:

This is probably my favorite of all the Select designs.  Cool angular shadowbox with team logo in foil over sweet marbled color field and name below in futuristic font.  Everything else on the card is a solid action photo.  Bright and fun, simple and attractive, this set offered a high-end look for relatively cheap.  I was a big fan when these came out.

I got a box of '95 Select for my birthday one year.  I pulled two Artist Proof cards, and yippee!  Both were Midre Cummings' Showtime rookie subset card.  I finally get a whole box and a guaranteed parallel hit, and I pull two of the same card.  Needless to say I pulled hard for ol' Midre to have a ridonkulous season, but it didn't quite turn out that way.

1996:

I think this year's design was even better than the Pinnacle's high-end flagship set.  The dark wood grain with gold foil looks warm and rich.  You get another nice portrait and another year of solid action photos.  Cool inserts, the shiny Artist Proof parallel, and some great photography all combine to make this one of the great unsung and underrated sets of the 90's.

1997:

Select dropped the ball here.  They abandoned the ever-improving and unique horizontal layouts for a boring, run-of-the-mill vertical card.  This vanilla design is dominated by two-color foil with the name written vertically up one side.  The foil team logo and monochromatic mini-portrait are the highlights here, but as a package this layout falls flat.

1998:



Isn't this sad?



The '98 set never really happened due to the Pinnacle bankruptcy, but a tiny number specimens from that set did make it out into general circulation including a handful of inserts and a couple of Griffeys.  Hence, I couldn't bring myself to put nothing here because there really are a few (20 or less) Griffeys out there in the '98 Select base card design. 

I won't go into too much detail here, but I will reveal that having seen the design, I think it was a step in the right direction for the brand.  Those that made it out into the world are likely in the hands of supercollectors with far more resources than me; so if any of you super-hooked-up Griffey collectors read this, please e-mail me a scan of card #116 so I can show the nice people.  Your secret identity is safe with me.

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Thus Select came and went like a fart in the wind, but it did hang around longer than some sets and even managed to produce some memorable cards.

I've said this before about other sets, but I'd like to have been at the design meeting in '97.  Such a drastic and terrible change in aesthetic still makes no sense to me.  Then again maybe this set was trying to carve out a niche in the market that just wasn't there. 

Here's every Select base card design in order by year:

Design Timeline: Leaf

This post is part of an ongoing feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.

Leaf was around before Griffey in the same way that O-Pee-Chee was around.  By that I mean for a kid in the American south, it wasn't.  Before that I understood them to be a regional brand.  I don't really count them as a set until they introduced their first mass-market product in 1990.  Touted as Donruss' premium set, people went nuts for it when it hit the market.  The photography wasn't out of this world, but it was solid enough.  They had a few hits design-wise in the 90's, but like many once-popular brands it stopped turning a profit and was shut down....twice.

When I collected in the mid-90's, Leaf were some of my favorite packs to rip.  They felt rich, like a poor man's Flair.  Sure, they were three bucks a pack which was a lot, but the inserts and subsets were great and the base cards were fancy.  At least they were in the 20th century - not so much in the 21st.  They still have a few of my favorite designs of the 90's and one in particular that's arguably my all-time favorite.

Here is every Leaf design in order from their first major set in 1990 to their final set of 2005:

1990:

This was a hugely popular set and remains so to this day.  It was completely different from every other set of it's time except Upper Deck who it was made to compete with.  The design is simple and clean and the backs feature full-color portraits and nice, big stat boxes.  I think people were ready for a design like this with muted colors that don't distract you from the picture.  Plus you've got to love that cursive "L," right bro?  Definitely the most fun upper-case letter to write in cursive! <high five>

1991:

The second of the three "silver sets," this one includes an intricate border with black corner finials like a photograph in a scrapbook.  The name is below in a white field with the position.  They left the team logos out of this design to avoid the card looking too cluttered.  Very fancy.

1992:

The white name in the black field looks great, and look!  A color design element for the first time in Leaf's mass-market history.  They underlined the name plate in red and include a team logo.  While this is the most cut-and-dry of the three silver sets, it's also my favorite.  Bold and striking, this is also the last Leaf set that would feature horizontally-oriented cards.

Over the next four years, team-coloring in and around the name plate replaces the rampant silver of the previous three sets.  Check it out:

1993:

Finally a full-bleed layout.  This set is characterized by that slanted name plate above the field of marbelized team color.  The gold lettering and brand-new logo proclaiming this card is from "The Leaf Set" (oohs and aahs) give this card a high-end look.  I'm a big fan of the blue ribbon beneath the seal showing the date, an element that is both useful and attractive.  Plus I feel like I won something.

1994:

The marble theme continued in this "wave" design with the new Leaf logo on one side.  The player name is in a prominent elongated font with the team written below nice and big.  The wave colors vary by the player's team, and they all match without coming across as gaudy.  Attractive design with a great use of color here has made this set a collector favorite.

1995:

There's a lot going on in this card, but I find everything comes together organically and attractively.  Every card in the set is vertically-oriented and most of the pictures are of players running, pitching, batting, and fielding - you know, stand-up stuff.  The photos keep the player towards the right side of every card to accomodate the team name and portait elements printed in translucent holofoil on the left.  Below is a team-colored bar with the player name in extremely fancy gold-foil script.  The new logo featuring the set year is also stamped in gold below the holofoil portrait.  If you flip through this set, you'll find that they picked the perfect pictures of every player to keep the design from appearing cluttered. 

Then again, I'm pretty biased.  I have an emotional bond with this set, and I'm currently only eight cards away from completing it.  That's a big deal for me as I'm not a set-builder.

1996:

Translucent foil bars tinted a team color fill the left and bottom borders with the Leaf logo in the corner.  The player name appears below in a fancy stretched font, and his poition is shown in a small circle up top.  It was quite a step back from the heavy-handedness of the previous set, but it's not unattractive and the photography was particularly good this year.

1997:

First I must admit that this is another great font and a really cool, modern design, all centered and looking great.  Frankly, everything in the middle of the card is right up my alley.

BUT...

That fade on either side, man.  I think the reason behind it is to create focus on the action in the middle, and in the first series of this set those fades were a nice silvery-gray color (like me saw in those first three Leaf sets).  It looked pretty good.  So what happened?  I'm not sure if someone made a conscious decision to do this or if they flipped a switch and screwed up the whole printing process of Series 2, turning the gray fade to a white one, but yikes.  What before was a subtle, attractive effect now looks like a washed-out eyesore.  I'm willing to bet that someone really liked the glow effect the white creates behind the name that wasn't there before, but that person needs to be hit in the head with a hammer.  Their worst design of the '90's - this card gives me a headache.

1998:

This card is easy to pass right over, but it's a really cool design if you really look.  First it's got this great organic border similar to that found on the 2001 Donruss 2000 "Throwback" insert design.  It's translucent so it frames the photo without obstructing it.  The small corner finials and 3D shading effect set it off nicely.  I also love the banner anniversary logo with the little spikes of modernity plus the inclusion of the team name up top, and what a great picture for this card.  A little more color may have boosted this set's appeal, but it really is a solid design.

This is the part when Donruss declares bankruptcy and is bought by Playoff, a football card company.  Four years later Leaf would return with a snazzy new logo and a terrible new design.

2002:

You tell me what aspects of the Leaf aesthetic are apparent in this design.  I mean it - show me one.  This card looks less like a Leaf card than an actual leaf.  Look at the big, stupid team name.  It's infuriating, but I do like the logo and the fact that it shows the set year.

2003:



The least horrible of the 21st Century Leaf designs, this set still isn't very good.  It does have a few positive attributes such as the red and black squares and lines remind me of a Piet Mondrian painting.  I like the slight fade on the right side of the photo, and I also appreciate that the team name isn't chewing the edges of the card.  Not horrible, but also not very Leaf.

2004:

Zzzzzzzzzzz...........

And what happened to including the set year in the logo?  These guys must have hated everything I like.

2005:

A classic lines-and-boxes-for-the-sake-of-lines-and-boxes design.  I've seen worse, but this might as well be an oddball promo card made for Pizza Hut.  By far the least Leafy of all the Leaf designs.

And that is where Leaf finally fell off the tree and got sucked up by the lawnmower.

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I really loved Leaf in my collecting heyday as you can probably tell from my enthusiasm about the earlier sets.  It remains one of the few brands I was genuinely excited about cracking packs of year after year, but after seeing what was done with the brand I'm glad I was no longer collecting when these last few sets went down.

Should we be glad the brand was allowed to come back for a few years, or would it have been better to let it go back in '98?  Stephen King taught us in his novel Pet Sematary that it's best to let the dead be dead; otherwise they become evil undead monsters who slice into your Achilles' tendon with a scapel.  Then again, in the film National Lampoon's Chritmas Vacation Uncle Louis burns the Griswold family Christmas tree with his stogie and says "At least it's out of its misery."  Between these two I'm siding with Uncle Louis.  He had a sweet rug.

Here is the complete Leaf design timeline from 1990 to their final set in 2005:

Design Timeline: Stadium Club

This post is part of an ongoing feature The Great Griffey Base Card Project.

Welcome to what may be the greatest of all the Design Timelines.

The secret to a great set is a great base card design and solid photography; and year over year, Stadium Club remained among the best-designed sets on the market.  There's not a single bad design in the bunch, and most of them are downright excellent.  They were always cutting-edge and fun as is evidenced by their cool inserts and parallels.  And the photography?  Fuhgeddaboudit.

I'm a huge proponent of this brand because I think the fusion of simple design and great photography has resulted in some of the best sets of the last 20 years.  You don't have to go nuts, adding and adding colors and lines and effects to make a great card.  Stadium Club as a brand proves that because none of their designs are particularly overbearing - quite the opposite: they tend to complement the photography without getting in the way. 

Here is every Stadium Club base card design in order:

1991:

This was Topps' first "premium" set, and they pretty much nailed it.  Full-bleed from their very first set, '91 Stadium Club had a lot of first-time features.  The vivid, full-color backs featured images of each player's Topps rookie card as well as new stat configurations.  The photography was fantastic as was the checklist.  And did I mention it was the first mass-market brand to put foil on every card?  When it burst onto the scene, huge premiums were being charged for packs.  This thing was just a total beast.

1992:

Topps knew they had some of the best photography in the game with this brand, and they flaunted it by putting a Kodak logo on boxes and packs and by designing with low-impact name plates so as not to interfere with the photograph.  This is the most extreme example of that low-impact design.  They might have gone a little too dry with this one: just a logo over a black bar and the player name.  I can't tell if they were being trailblazers or just lazy, but the photography in this set is good enough that it doesn't really matter.

1993:

This sporty design is the first of my three favorite sequential Stadium Club designs.  Not a lot to it - just a red bar accented in gold and a little baseball with motion lines.  The exciting font is pressed right into the card in gold with black shading, and the SC logo hovers over the name plate majestically.  It's a simple design, but also a bold one that looks great with any team and in any orientation. 

1994:

The label maker set.  This design seemed cool and gritty at first, then after a few years passed it started to seem hokey as the label maker was phased out of everyday life (my grandpa had one), but now I find it nostalgic and fun.  It's hard to naysay when a set has such great photos.  They focused on red again, and it turned out pretty awesome.  That new SC logo only lasted this one year.

1995:

Another great-looking design, I remember these being slightly thicker than normal (am I imagining that?).  A nice, balanced design with yet another new SC logo design, this one revolves around that shape at the bottom containing the team logo.  The player name appears below in yet another bold, modern font.  Classy.  Another personal favorite.

1996:

This design appears modern to the point of futuristic.  It's a simple curved color bar with the name stamped in foil and a single textured accent line.  In the future everything will have little spikes, so that's appropriate.  The baseball in the SC logo is also a nice touch.

1997:

Check out the great Willy Wonka name plate.  This year's design is fancy and whimsical with stars and matte gold filigree and that great spiral.  The color bar is raised with the player name imprinted in gold.  These came in red or blue, and they looked great either way.  The Matrix limited parallel is damn beautiful - it bothers me that I'll someday have to put it in my '97 Stadium Club set post, and I already know the scan won't do it justice. 

Anyhoo, this is the first and last year the base card would not feature the latest Stadium Club logo.  They simply printed the brand below the name plate.  I'm not sure how I feel about that.  It's not as ugly as when someone's house address is spelled out in letters (old people are guilty of this a lot).  Normally I would prefer a logo, but the round TSC logo would look out of place on this card.  I guess they got it right.

1998:

This is the first year of the "brick" logo that would last to the end of the brand and even it's attempted reintroduction.  Now, while I'm appreciative that Stadium Club never try and shove anything down our throats design-wise, a little embellishment can be fun.  Here they give us another year of stellar photography as well as a new logo in awesome holofoil and a shiny player name.  You can see the baseball stitch design on opposing corners, the bottom one containing some silver foil.  It's a reasonably cool card, right?

And yet, I can't help believing that they intended these cards to be enjoyed on a more tactile level.  The first thing you notice about this set is that the cards are a little thicker than normal and incredibly glossy - I mean like a seal that just hopped onto an ice floe and the water is still streaming down it's skin and it's all shiny and glisteny?  That glossy.  It looks like they applied several layers of glossiness to achieve this level of uber-gloss.  Moreover, the "stitched" corners are embossed, giving the feeling that the card was wrapped around a baseball to achieve the effect.  The result is a rich-feeling card that's a delight to handle.

Go find a '98 Stadium Club card and hold it in your hands.  It's the cardboard equivalent of petting a really soft bunny.

1999:

This one reminds me of another one of my favorite sets of all time: '95 Upper Deck.  It's a little more stylized with the cool baseball effect and the holofoil, but its still very similar.  The team logo is also shown in the top left corner in the lowest-impact fashion I've ever seen on a card.  The font is a bit plain, but overall this design embodies the spirit of non-interference combined with great photography that makes SC so likeable.

2000:

This year they went with a waving pennant in team colors sporting holofoil printing and team logo.  The font has been updated, too.  Simple, classy, fun, one of my favorites in the timeline.  Great base card.

2001:

Only Ultra has more shots of Griffey fielding - it makes for some great pictures.  This is the only time they would ever take up the entire bottom border of a card, and I think they did it well.  Everything's centered, I love the date on the front, the name bar looks sweet in holofoil, and I'm a big fan of incorporating baseballs into the design.  Not as minimalist as some other years, but a fun design.

2002:

Again, could be more minimalist.  Every brand has that one set (some have more) wherein they go for that "modern" lines-and-shapes-for-the-sake-of-lines-and-shapes design.  This is Stadium Club's.  While not as indulgent as some other brands (Upper Deck went nuts with it in a lot of designs), this design still takes you out of the timeline.  It could have been a lot worse, and it's actually one of the better designs I've seen in that vein.

2003:

This feels more like a Stadium Club card.  Another one of their more muted designs, '03 sports a small, simple name plate and a logo set apart with semi-circles.  While the monochromatic, all-holofoil look is something to behold, a little more embellishment would have been appropriate, too.

And that was the last set in SC's continuous history.  They would disappear from shelves for a full five years before....

2008:

I love this design because it reminds me so much of the '93 design, and I love the '93 design.  It looks great with the team-appropriate color bars as opposed to 1993's all-red, but it's practically the same font.  Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to have seen the little baseball make a comback here.  Fans of the original set would have gone nuts.

So what happened?  I wasn't collecting around the time this set came out, but if I had been I would have been very excited at the set's return.  Unfortunately it didn't do terribly well due to its having been remade into a completely different product by Topps.  I'll explore it more when I do an '08 Stadium Club post, but suffice it to say they screwed up what should have been an easy sell and now Stadium Club has gone the way of numerous crappier brands.  Prizm, however, remains widely available.

This brand deserved better.

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Bringing back Stadium Club seems like a no-brainer to me.  Topps owns it, right?  They have the MLB license, and they use it to make a half-dozen or so other brands that I don't buy.  Meanwhile this great brand with an awesome history is just sitting in the barn.  What is the holdup? 

If you're looking for someone to spearhead the project, Topps, I'd like to throw my hat into the ring.  Who better than a seasoned collector with good taste and an appreciation for the brand's core aesthetic to help resurrect a classic set?  I am not kidding.  Let's make money together.

While I wait for Topps to blow up my e-mail, here's the complete timeline of Stadium Club card designs: