1992 Fleer Baseball: Expanded Redesign

Back in March, I tried a redesign of the 1992 Fleer baseball set. It was mainly to see how the cards would look with a border color other than the green that Fleer went with.  

I settled on two color options, navy blue and charcoal, and then selected a few cards to experiment with for each color. Well, I enjoyed the outcome (not to mention the reader response) so much that I wanted to experiment a little more. That's where this expanded redesign comes in. 

With charcoal looking especially sharp—and probably being a better, more neutral fit across the board—I decided to try that color on one card from each baseball team. Results are below, running alphabetically by city.

For the sake of comparison, let's start by showing the original 1992 design. Here we have cards from the first three teams: Atlanta, Baltimore, and Boston.

And the redesign:

Let's go through the rest of the teams.

With 26 teams total, I needed to fill that last slot. So I found one of the art cards that appear at the back of the set and gave it the charcoal treatment as well. It's rad enough that Ken Griffey Jr. is in outer space, deposited on an unknown planet by a diffraction of light through some sort of prism or interstellar travel device. But change the green border to a charcoal gray and it's even more rad. (Were kids still saying "rad" in 1992?)

Overall, I tried to match the color of the player names to the team colors a little more than Fleer did with the original design, while also making sure to keep the names bright against the dark gray.

As for the photography, I hope you'll agree that there are some excellent examples in this set. With the charcoal borders, I think the images really stand out more than they do against the original green, and I tried to choose a card from each team that exemplifies the point.

I have to admit something, though. After seeing each team laid out like this in the charcoal border, I started to think, Wait a minute. This looks like 1986 Topps, but using the player names instead of the team names and then rotating the text 90 degrees.

I wonder if the designers at Fleer considered using a similar color for the borders, but then thought the same thing. After all, 1986 was only a few years in the rear-view mirror at that point.

Regardless, I still really like the way these cards turned out. Hope you do, too.

Thanks for reading, as always.