Dark Shadows: The Revival Trading Cards

This was a difficult one.

The 1991 Dark Shadows revival series never had a series of trading cards, which is odd when you consider there was a glut of non-sport cards released around that time (and why were there no cards produced for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?) While watching the first episode of the 1991 series last night I decided to mock-up some faux cards, and it was a lot more difficult than I would have guessed.

First of all, many of the cards that were released around 1991 looked horrible. These were nebulous times, with card design trapped between the more simple styles of the '70s and '80s, and the pending borderless-glossy styles that were beginning to take old in sports card collecting. If you were lucky, the styles were garish. If you weren't lucky you were stuck with flat, sexless designs like THIS. And I didn't want to commit myself to designing a bunch of cards that were nothing more than photos with a flat border on them. And I really didn't want to design something that looked modern and distracted from the show's time period.

So I came up with something that, IMHO, looks like a design that would be garish enough for 1991 but isn't too mundane. I hope you like them.