Cardboard Creations: Clear for Takeoff

Seeing the latest custom design over at My Hockey Card Obsession, which is pretty impressive I might add, is what motivated me to finish the latest custom set idea I've been working on and finally share it with everyone. This is another one of those ideas that just came out of nowhere and I just started throwing things together and what you see below is the final result of a few different iterations and a few hours work.

Here's the first card in the set, featuring Valtteri Filppula of the Detroit Red Wings: 

While this one wasn't the inspiration for the set idea, it ended up being the best picture and my favorite of the bunch. As you can see, these cards deal with pictures in which the players are airborne, whether that means they are scoring, taking a shot, or just avoiding an opponent. Also, if you don't know, the picture above was taken as Filppula beat Marc-Andre Fleury in game two of the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. 

As far as the name, Clear for Takeoff, it just kind of popped in my head and I stuck with it. Now I know it's not that original, but sometimes things just work the way they are and I think that's the case here. Or should I have gone with Cleared for Takeoff, oh well, who knows? It is what it is now.

Anyway, here are all nine of them together:

Beyond the Filppula, the Colby Armstrong has to be my next favorite, and that's the one that was actually the inspiration for the entire set. As far as how that goes, well I came across a Puck Daddy article on the top hockey hugs and some of them featured players leaping into the air. Well, at first I thought I would do that for the set, but then I came across the Armstrong pic and changed my mind to what you see here. 

After a little searching for a generic airport runway/takeoff pic and the clipart pilot's wings, I threw everything together and came up with the basic design you see here. I played around a bit with different fonts, but ended up settling on the one you see, called "Bigmacca" from Dafont.com. I though it went well with the whole airplane theme.

The five stars were the last thing I added as I felt the name bar just needed a little something extra, and they fit the bill perfectly. The only other thing I made sure to do was include a nice full color team logo on each card, and the circle in the center of the pilot's wings worked out just right for that.

So what do you guys think? I was going for something that was a bit different and I think I accomplished that, wouldn't you say?