The rites of spring are here. Players are reporting for spring training, and Topps has released its flagship baseball card set. Series 1 made its debut on Feb. 14, and longtime collectors will see a design that is less traditional than previous issues.
This year’s model features a neon border and a smoky black backdrop at the top of the card front. In previous years, a “radical” design change meant that the card had a full-bleed photo or a different color than the traditional white border. But Robert Grabe, the senior graphics designer at Topps, spearheaded this year’s design and has presented a more colorful, vibrant look.
The year’s flagship product does not have a “play-it-safe” vibe. It is not your standard, almost “stuffed shirt” presentation from past issues. They are comparable to breaks from the past, like the 1972 “psychedelic” look, for example.
“I was certainly not trying to reinvent the wheel,” said Grabe, 40, who has worked at Topps for more than a decade. “I was trying to add my spoke to it.”
Grabe has been the lead designer for several Topps sets, including Big League Baseball last year and the Champions League soccer product.
He faced the challenge of keeping the flagship Topps look while putting his own stamp on the design.
“I like using a lot of color in my designs, so I think that’s where my process started,” Grabe said. “Just like, ‘How am I gonna get color in there, how am I gonna do it different from other years?’ So it was a little bit trial and error to start before it kind of started making sense, like ‘Hey this kind of looks a little bit like neon, where can I take that?’ And kind of building from there.”
Grabe has called his inspiration for Series 1 a “rebellion against monochrome.”
“That’s my inner art kid that’s coming out,” he said. “I do like to use color in design, so the base card is pretty traditional with the white borders, and very, I don’t know, stuffed shirt, and everything.
“You get a lot of base cards in a pack, and so you’re flipping through and think, ‘It’s gonna get a little old if every one kind of looks the same.’ But if you use that pop of color, and it’s arranged in different ways, it’s going to be more eye-catching and be more interesting.”
He may have the mind of an artist, but Grabe also has a deep love for baseball cards. He began collecting around 1988, going full bore on cards beginning with the 1990 Topps set – “my parents still have a basement full of them,” he joked.
Grabe took elements from the 1990 set – and some from 1986 Topps – to create the 2024 design, while also borrowing some ideas from 1970s issues.
“I felt like that gave me license to get a little weirder with the design if I needed to, because in the past we had gotten pretty weird,” Grabe said. “When I needed a solution for the dark fade at the top, I looked at the 1986 design, because that has the big bright team name at the top and a big box around it.
“I just really liked that design so I wanted to take that idea – like mine’s not a straight black box, it’s kind of a smoky fade. I think it fits the vibe of neon, and I think it’s a nice update,” he added. “I would say there’s kind of callbacks to lots of years and designs, because they all kind of leak in there, floating around in there somewhere.”
In addition to baseball cards, Grabe also grew up enjoying comic books. He cites the work of Jim Lee (Superman, the first X-Men comic) and Jack Kirby (Iron Man and hundreds of other characters) as influences. He graduated in 2005 from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree for sequential art – “a fancy name for comic books.”
He was the illustrator for Scholastic’s 2008 comic book, “The Twilight Zone: The Odyssey of Flight 33.” Rod Serling’s screen adaptation was written in comic book form by Mark Kneece, who helped found the sequential art department at SCAD.
Grabe also did illustrations for the comic book “Coin Operated Boy,” which was also the name of a 2004 song by the Dresden Dolls, a duo from Boston.
“I grew up reading comics, I still read a ton of comics,” he said. “What I like about the Jim Lees and the Jack Kirbys of the world is how bold they are, how big everything feels. There’s a real pop to their art and I think that suits our trading cards as well – especially the Series 1 base cards.
“I imagine these as little 2½ by 3½ posters of all these players. If this is all you knew about this player, I’d like for it to be something dynamic. Maybe you could tell something about how they play.”
There were some challenges in using neon and other flashy elements.
“I needed something to have the team name stand out against the back,” Grabe said. “It was problematic because the team name (for 2024) is set in the team colors. Squads like the Royals, Rays and Athletics have yellow as a primary color.
“The only way to get it to stand out is to put something dark behind it.”
He added that the neon will be an attractive element for sets down the road, including Chrome.
“I think it’s gonna look really cool in Chrome,” Grabe said.
Although neon is a new concept, Grabe did not try to clutter up the card front with too many elements. The result is a bold design that is still simple, which was a goal.
“Very much so. That is something else that I developed in my comic book life,” Grabe said. “Something nice and clear, you know what the action is. It’s hard to check all the boxes of what you need on a card front – player name, position, (team) logo, Topps (logo). There’s a lot of stuff to sort on there, so I really tried to make the image frame just as big as possible, pushing against the image of the edges of the card as much as I could to really open up things and buy as much space as possible.”
As for the card backs, Grabe said he kept them “really clean.” Statistics remain a cherished topic for baseball fans, so he wanted to present something straightforward.
“That’s where I learned baseball. My encyclopedic knowledge of old players and stats,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you all the state capitals, but I can tell you all the baseball stats.”
While a product of 1990s baseball cards, Grabe said he loved the small cartoons that Topps used to put on the backs during the 1960s.
“I like those, I liked the fun facts, the trivia that came with them too,” he said. “I’d love to do some cartoons again, that’s a lot of work. I don’t know. Maybe in our meeting for ’25 we’ll pitch that.”
Grabe laughed when noting that his inspirations for this year’s cards came from the “junk wax era.”
“It’s not my fault that I grew up when that bubble was getting big,” he chuckled. “I remember buying some Upper Deck, too, and the hologram on the back, and I thought that was the coolest thing.
“It’s hard when I’m asked, ‘What’s your favorite design?’ It’s probably the last design I looked at, because there’s so many that have something great about them.”
This year’s set brings back Golden Mirror Image Variations, featuring a different photograph of a player and an all-gold card back. One image, for example, depicts Mariners star Julio Rodriguez holding a trident.
“I think we had a lot of fun with those,” Grabe said. “You have the traditional base cards where the pitcher’s throwing, guys are hitting, but I think in those Golden Mirrors you see a little more energy, or personality. It’s not quite where the Stadium Club image stuff comes in, but it’s something you don’t normally see in the base set.”
Grabe has been the lead designer for several Topps sets, but the flagship product usually gets the most buzz because it is the first release of the year.
“Not my first rodeo, but certainly my biggest. The most bold to tame,” he said. “Hopefully, my design is a little bit different from the past.
“I want it to be fun for people. I want people to get excited when they open these packs, because we had a blast working on it and I hope people will feel that. I always thought that the Topps flagship set is like the newspaper of record. It is the story of the season. So, if you want to know what happened and who did it, you can build your encyclopedia based on this set.”
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Check out 2024 Topps cards on eBay here.
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