Where in the world am I today?: Princess Cays, Bahamas aboard the Emerald Princess

Well, it’s that time of the year again… A couple of months I put out a bit of a query hoping that I could enlist the assistance of someone…anyone…who might have a bit of design sense who I could convince to help me with the design of the 2010 Trading Card… Nobody answered the call, so I sat down and came up with something myself and sent out the initial design to a few folks who’ve ordered cards in the past to get their feedback. Mike Wood stepped up and introduced me to the Mike Wood Hockey Card Rules (MWHCW).

From when I initially sent the design to Mike for review to when we eventually settled on the final details of the 2010 design it ended up taking about a month I’d say. This process took longer than I had anticipated, but having two sets of eyes looking things over means that the end results are stronger than they would have been otherwise. The more we tweaked the more I found that certain basic design concepts kept coming up and in the end I felt like we achieved an uncluttered simple elegance to the design. In Mike’s words –

This year’s card is a modern update of the classic sports trading cards of yore. Think late-70s hockey card. They’ve got everything but the chewing gum stain. They’re a little asymmetrical for one thing, which was a trick that helped those old timers hide the fact that their donkey-powered machinery often cut entire sheets of cards completely askew. To keep the whole thing looking like a set, the base colour scheme is white, with navy blue for the details (text, pin-stripes etc.). For the accent colour, any shade within the spectrum of visible light is up to the individual player performer to decide. Back in the day I used to love when O-Pee-Chee used a colour in this way to highlight something other than team affiliation. One year, all the defensemen got a green outline, and the rookies all got pink. Good times…

I sent my cards in to be printed a few weeks back and am looking forward to getting them back in about a week or so. The order information went on-line shortly after I had made my order and I made an initial announcement on Facebook after everything went live at:

http://www.superstarperformers.com/regular-season-order.html

I’ve discussed how great these trading cards are in a previous post so I won’t bother going into the hows and whys of my love affaire with this particular piece of promotional material, but those who order these cards once often end up ordering them again and again and again. If you’ve ordered the cards in past and want new cards for the start of the 2010 Season then get your orders in soon to ensure that the cards are in your hands before the beginning of the new year. If you’ve never ordered these cards then why not treat yourself to something new in the way of self promotional tools… If you have even half as much fun as I do with these, then you’ll have a blast handing these things out!