Cardboard Creations: Artifacts

Usually my custom set designs are one of two things: a straight up recreation of an existing set or a unique design of my own, even if some of them are inspired by other sets out there. The latest project is a bit of a hybrid. As you can tell by the title, this one has something to do with UD Artifacts, which has had some really nice designs.

It actually stared back in October of last year when I was playing around with a few custom set ideas and just happened to be looking at some of my UD Artifacts base cards. I thought to myself, why not try and make my own version of the set? Well, after a few design iterations and staying up til 2:00 am last night, I managed to come up with a set of nine.

Here's a closer look at the first of nine:

I wanted to have a background that would stand out and I think the blue fractal does just that, wouldn't you agree? After that I added the slight fading coming up from the bottom behind the player. Then it was onto the border, which was pieced together from a sample I found online. The position, name, and number bar was pretty simple, but I added the arch in the middle just to give it a little something extra.

Another thing I did that is pretty neat was having the borders of the card overlap the picture, giving it a nice clean look all the way around. I also added the Artifacts word mark to the top and a desaturated team logo to the bottom. The last piece was the picture, which I added a blur effect to, that's why they look a little out of focus from a distance.

Now, here's all nine of them together:

You may be wondering about the choice of goalies here. The reason I chose the group that I did was just to make things easier. I found a Photobucket account that has a bunch of cropped player images, so I just picked through the different teams and found the most usable goalie pics, and this is what I ended up with. 

I wish I could've found a pre-cropped picture of Jimmy Howard for this set, but oh well, I'll have to save that for another project. I think my favorite would have to be the Miller. It was the first one I was working on and served as the template for the rest of them. 

What do you guys think? Any comments or criticisms are greatly appreciated.