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  1. #1




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    FW Recreating Cards in Vector format

    Usually when I do some sort of art project I want to talk about it somewhere. Due to certain circumstances, I am limited a little bit, but I figured that posting about it here would be just fine. I am working on a project to create baseball card designs. Initially they wanted 1989 Topps but then said they wanted places to put extra text. Because I'm big on both baseball cards and design, I knew I didn't want to use that set design because it... really wouldn't work. So I send along a bunch of examples of cards that had photo and text areas. In the end (and as I had hoped) 1976 Topps Traded won out.

    Originally I wanted to just "shop" (or "fw") an existing scan of a 1976 Topps Traded card... Unfortunately I couldn't find any that were pixel perfect even. So I found this:
    http://mets360.com/wp-content/upload...pps-Lolich.jpg

    And proceeded to "guess" the sizes of the main elements. The card stock, the yellow border, the name/pos box at the bottom. Card stock was some pic of cardboard I found on Google images and changed the contrast/brightness to be acceptable to me. I cut out the "newspaper" portion, rotated and rebuild it in vector. It isn't perfect. Then I worked on trying to recreate the text, which was fairly easy as they are typefaces that come with Windows. I used Times New Roman and Tunga. With the typefaces I did use some effects on them to appear closer to how they look on the scan.

    In the following pic you can see the original card newspaper part (rotated) as well as the custom path I made for it, and the joined object path to create the entire part. In addition, the test typefaces above and below the original scan.


    In the following image, you will see where I rebuilt the original newspaper image and rotated it (and the text) to match the original orientation. You can tell from this pic what software was used to do it in. See? Not everyone uses Photoshop!


    Lastly the text areas are highlighted on the final vector recreation. One main difference with previous pics is that I removed part of the shadow from the newspaper portion by simply adding a circle vector of the same color as the pos/name bar.


    So how did I do? I kinda cheaped out on just using drop-shadow on the newspaper part and hiding part of it with an object. This was also my first time (that I remember) making a custom vector object using this software... and I've been using it since it came out.

    I can make this vector template available for whoever wants it, however note that it was created in Fireworks MX 2004.
    Last edited by Tripredacus; 11-29-2017 at 01:28 PM. Reason: fixed images

  2. #2




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    The original 1976 Topps Traded design was used on a Pinball livestream show on twitch.tv. The new season is starting today, and I got to make a new design. This time I was given more freedom... or let's say less direction, as to how to make the design. One of the main things that the custom card design requires is a place to put extra information. This really cuts down on what designs I can use as a base, as a card with only two spots for text cannot be used. During the process of using the cards, there did turn out to be a time where we used a subsitute and did not use the extra information.

    For the substitute card design, I picked 1986/87 Kay Bee Superstars of Baseball. This was by far the most challenging one to build and it was because of the Kay Bee logo. It was not a vector object and no existing vector image could be found online. Also the white bounding box around the character was difficult to do, and I kinda did it "good enough" to make it work. The Kay-bee logo is not one from a card scan. It was taken from a scan of a print ad/flyer for the toy store, then cleaned up.



    This above is an in-progress shot of the image build. After the Kay-Bee logo was done but before the frame was punched. That is what the large blue rounded rectangle is on the object list on the left. It looks like a background in the main image, but it is what I eventually use to put a hole through the base card design. The base card color is not white, neither any of the final color choices, they are color picked from the original reference image. In this image you can also see the reference image exists on another layer, but is not clearly visible. When building a card I make all the main objects have contrasting colors, and also change the opacity of them so that you can see how things line up with the other layers.



    Above is the final card build. As I said, the hardest part was the border behind the Kay-bee man. Even now you can look at it, and it isn't perfect but it was the best I could get out of it. And you can see on the right, the large rectangles are no longer there, after the merging and manipulations they are the things labeled as composite path. The bright pink color is just having the canvas background set to a standard alpha color.



    And here is the layer breakdown for the 1988 Fleer Exciting Stars redesign. The black color is just the canvas color here. The colors are not your standard red/white/blue as I used the color match to an actual scan of the card. And of course, I made it more centered as the actual cards are known for not being cut centered. The baseball was replaced with a pinball instead. The Fleer logo was changed to IFPA, the organization that handles world ranking leaderboards for competitions. Baseball's was replaced with our company's brand Buffalo Pinball's. This one was a bit easier to put together. The most time I spent on it was trying to find *anything* that was close to what typeface Fleer had used for "Baseball's". I just couldn't find it. And afterwards, then the search became to find something that was not only similar, but looked good on the design. I think this was the sixth different font I used before it stuck.

    The twitter account posted the final designs last night, if you want to see them here:
    https://twitter.com/buffalopinball/s...32073344176128
    And of course here you can see what the actual cards look like:
    http://opg.sportscardforum.com/scf/i...exciting-stars
    Last edited by Tripredacus; 11-29-2017 at 01:29 PM.

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