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*Carpy48* · 05-03-2024, 10:00 AM

The creation process of a new SHL card set

When you collect SHL trading cards all you - the user - typically do is to go to the cards site, either pay for packs or use your daily subscription and get colorful packs to click on to open them. Then you flip through your newly acquired cards, admire them, or get annoyed because you expected some of the rare specialty cards and not your 54th duplicate of bronze Cal Clucker. Later in your collecting career you might try and trade for some or start collecting special cards or cards from only one team. The real enthusiasts even join our trading cards discord server and discuss new cards every day. It's a fun little extra activity we have on the site and you finally have a reason to chirp more to afford your card addiction. If you don't collect cards yet, join us, it's fun!

Do you ever wonder what happens behind the scenes? Where do these cards come from? How are they made?

Since we just released a brand new card set, let's go back and explain the process of how these even came to be. From the first idea to the finished product (the card) appearing in one of your packs - with some luck of course. The main work for the IIHF Award set was done by @enigmatic and myself so we'll guide you through the process. It's a little project in itself and overall quite similar to how the 2k and 1OA templates were created.

The new IIHF Award set is technically not even an SHL card set, but the idea of having an IIHF set as well had been on our radar for some time already, especially after releasing the most recent Charity, 2K, and 1OA sets. It's a new, unique set. As someone who has been either Co or Fed Head for an IIHF team for over 25 seasons now and really cares about this part of the league, it's a way to bring it back on the radar for many people.

What do you need for a new set?

To narrow it down:

a) a card template design

b) the player data (e.g. names, renders, seasons)

c) some database work

d) card creators with lots of time

We knew we wanted to make an IIHF card set. That part was easy, but we somehow had to limit the amount of cards to include in this. Making a card for every single player who played an international game, like with the SHL base cards, would've been too much work for us. Since we never made SMJHL cards either we knew to exclude WJC teams. The next internal discussion was about retired players, i.e. everyone retired from the IIHF would get a card, but even this would be a lot of work and we simply (still) don't have the number of card designers with the necessary graphics skills needed for this. The idea was discarded too.

At some point during the discussion, an IIHF Award set was mentioned for the first time. We have SHL award cards already, but making IIHF award cards would reduce the workload considerably because there are only three awards given out per IIHF tournament every season: best forward, best defender, and best goalie. It would also be more exciting than just another base set. Award cards give you the chance to be more creative and make them look more artistic since they use less text compared to some other sets. We could even remove the OVR number from them because it wasn't necessary. We had an idea, but now we needed a template and collect data.

Collecting data is both easy and tedious work. Thankfully our site historians and nowadays also the portal people have collected all the data for us. What was left were individual renders and jersey numbers that had to be researched. That is a considerable amount of research work. Some of this work luckily had already been done previously for the 2k cards, but it's still part of the 'invisible work' that is necessary for making cards. Big thanks at this point go to @TheOPSquid who helped find old render data from the STHS era before they were on profile pages.

Next up is the template. This is major work that needs to be completed before work can be done on individual cards, because this is what the card is all about. It had to look good, at least to us. Both of us had created new card templates before, but this one we wanted to create together. We didn't know it would turn out to be sooo difficult. However, we use this as a learning process going forward and creating future sets will be easier.

The first, very basic sketch looked like this:

The best ideas all start with something basic, but this one obviously wasn't being used Smile

Then we came back with an older idea that we had talked about during the creation process of the 1OA card template: Use polaroid photos pinned onto the background, like a board with vacation pictures from the player's country. Perhaps a little like this:

[Image: 89410316b37600e5a31b430824b2e6c6.jpg]

That's how the idea of a 'travel theme' came up and it didn't use polaroids at all. Travel and country flags work very well with international hockey where everything is about the different nations. Here is one of many iterations eni worked on. Looks cool, but wasn't used. It's all part of the process.

Looks cool, but wasn't used. It's all part of the process.

After many more drafts and discussions, we first arrived here:

then here: [Image: yqhg2jl.png]

and eventually here: [Image: kmK0juA.png]

This is where the idea and the entire creative process paused for a while. We just had very different opinions... and eventually needed to get a third person involved to solve this 'stalemate' and help find a compromise for the design. @sulovilen took the best of both ideas and created this template that is very close to the final variant we used for all cards you can see below (ignore the fact that render and name don't match please):

Let's take a closer look at the template and learn how it was created

In the background, you see a vector map of each country with a radial color gradient using the two main colors of the country's flag. On top of the map is a vintage-style paper luggage tag with a very subtle transparency to show the map underneath. Travel theme - remember? Then just some decoration, a country logo and some text about the country on the luggage tag (see below), more decoration, and obviously the most important part: a render and the name tag. That one isn't pinned to the background but attached with a paperclip to create some kind of subtle depth for the different layers. We decided to completely leave out the player's position and stats and also combine multiple awards won by the same player into one card, e.g. if one player one three "top goalie" awards they still only get one card. To finish the template the good old I-C-E- LEVEL logo is in the top right corner.

Here is an empty background without the render.

You can see that for country's without English names we added the country's name in their own language as well. For the country's code we went with the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, in this example LVA for Latvia as opposed to the 3 digit codes the Olympics use (in which case it would be LAT). For many countries they are identical, but just in case anyone was curious about that part. For some countries there are country codes with 2 different background colors to achieve a larger contrast between the jersey and the background depending on which jersey (home/away) we used, you'll see those when they're pulled.

What needs to be done to finish the template from here?

A template is nothing but a PSD (Photoshop) file that other card creators can open and work with. The final cards will all look the same.

We have 15 IIHF teams including those that no longer exist, so 15 individual backgrounds needed to be created including the map layer and the luggage tag layer. Then we had to collect data for all players that won awards, look up their renders and jersey numbers of choice, and to create final cards: edit a lot of renders. Some were easier to make because some players use renders from the same country and real IIHF photo material exists - others needed complete jersey swaps. We decided to use @Thunfish 's custom IIHF logos which are also used on the IIHF index for this. To give you an idea: on average work on a render takes eni or myself about 45-60 minutes. It's not unusual for one single card to take over an hour to make including all details and that does not include the time needed for prior research. Another important part of the template is to look for the longest and shortest possible names to find a font size that works for all of them.

Okay, so the cards are all designed now, what's next?

To upload the cards into the database and for them to appear in packs, some work needed to be done in the database. Even more of this invisible background work that you don't see. We didn't have IIHF teams in the database before, only SHL teams - so new team IDs had to be added and eventually all the raw card data had to be imported. The cards also needed a rarity % that determines how likely - or unlikely - it is for you to pull one. That work was done by our department head/developer @caltroit_red_flames. After that had happened we could finally announce the project to the public and eventually upload all the cards that we had prepared until now. They then went through our internal approval process before they made their way into your packs.

Here we are with our first set of IIHF award cards. If you're new to cards and would like a free pack, be quick and post in this thread.

What is the point of this article you might ask? It's to show one aspect of the league that I've referred to in the post up there as 'invisible work' or behind the scenes work, but mostly just to show how our creative process works on the other hand. There are many jobs in the league that are less visible to the public than others and not much talked about and yet they take a ton and effort of time to do. While cards are purely for entertainment and the league could theoretically run without it, we put a lot of work into it. There are other invisible jobs out there. I wouldn't mind similar articles about other jobs if anyone wants to dive into those.

Thanks to everyone who helped with this project, especially to eni for not hating me (too much) after all of this Smile

Now go and enjoy the cards!