Towards the end of 2021 I was approached by the folks at Terror Vision Records to share some of my designs for the Monster Squad trading cards I did back in 2014 to help support their upcoming release of the movie’s score on cassette. I jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with them as I was happy to help and the idea of getting some of my designs printed up seemed really cool. At the same time, those designs were the first digital trading cards I’d made, and after working on another 9 sets I’d refined my abilities a lot. They also weren’t meant for print, so the resolution was way too low. So I suggested that I could redesign them with a bolder, more dynamic aesthetic. I’d been meaning to take another crack at them anyway.
I’m still really proud of the original designs considering that I’d never done anything like that before. But I definitely feel like, the card fronts in particular, are kind of boring. The biggest flourish is the drip of blood for the numbering, but that was just a design I swiped from the old Topps Dinosaurs Attack set. I pretty much just aped that design and added a Squad alternate logo. The card-backs were 100% my design and I was pretty happy with how those came out. So it was back to square one for the fronts.
My first thought was that I needed to utilize the color scheme from the original theatrical poster, leaning heavily on a dark or rich blue along with flourishes of red and yellow. I liked the idea of the drip of blood from the Dinosaurs Attack cards, so I used ran in that direction, but with an arterial splatter instead of a droplet. I also kept the back relatively the same as the originals, so I feel like the dark blue on the front offset the oranges on the back.
Terror Vision wanted a small set, only 10 cards. Their idea was to include a single random trading card with each cassette purchase, and would also offer a larger bundle of stuff that included the full set of cards as a bonus. So my next step was picking a decent set of imagery and trivia for the cards. Since the whole idea was to support Bruce Broughton’s score, I knew I had to dedicate one of the cards to him. For the rest I decided to lean on a few group shots since I only had 10 cards to work with. I also knew I wanted to work some more “behind the scenes” imagery into the set so that I could feature folks like Stan Winston, Fred Dekker and Shane Black.
Overall I was really happy with how these came out and I love that I finally have an actual physical set of trading cads that I can put in my Monster Squad collection.
