It can be beneficial to pay attention to your surroundings. You never know when the slightest little detail will catch your eye and inspire you to create the design for your company’s latest release.

For Topps senior designer Phil Imbriano, inspiration came last year on his subway ride to work. His gaze fell upon a red-and-silver badge in the corner of the car. The lines and the curves prompted him to snap a picture with his phone, and when he got to the office, he started sketching out card designs with similar lines on paper before refining the look on his computer.

A few months later, after four rounds of an in-house competition at Topps, Imbriano’s submission was selected to be the base design for the 2025 baseball cards, which sees Series 1 released today.

“I like to take stuff in the everyday world that I see, and I like to just take little photos on my phone and reference it later on,” Imbriano said in a recent interview. “And it could be anything. It could be architecture. It could be a building. Could be a sign. Just anything that catches my eye when I'm out there in the world.”

With two bold lines swooping up the left side and then across the tops of the cards, the design is reminiscent of Topps’ 1982 cards – though in 2025, the lines are rendered in team colors.

That callback is just a coincidence, Imbriano said, adding “there’s virtually nothing truly original in graphic design.” Still, he likes the nod to the past. In fact, when he first started out working on a 2025 design, Imbriano was looking to the wood-panel feel of the 1962 and ’87 sets for inspiration.

“[Eighty-two] is not what my initial start was,” he said. “But coincidentally, it kind of happened that way, which I think is a good is a good thing because it kind of meshes some of the vintage style with some new modern design takes. So I think it's kind of a blend of vintage with modern, which is good.”

Imbriano’s design beat out 20 other submissions in the internal competition, which consists of four rounds over two or three months in late spring and early summer. Sometimes, elements from non-winning contenders from previous years make it into a future set. That’s the case this year, with a graphic of a field in the lower right featuring a dot at the position of the player pictured on the card.

From that day on the subway, Imbriano figures he made about 10 different variations of the design before settling on his final one.

“There’s a ton that goes into how we get to the final product,” he said, “which I think probably people don't really think about when they're holding the card in their hand.”

At a certain point, the designs on the screen become actual cards, to give folks at Topps like senior vice president of product Clay Luraschi a chance to get a literal feel for how these potential collectibles might look.

“When we get to the final five [designs], we'll actually print the cards out and then go through the whole pack experience,” Luraschi said. “But the process takes some time and there's a lot of great designs. So it's one of the most contentious discussions in the building the entire year.”

He laughed before continuing.

“The team knows how important it is,” he said. This is the 74th edition of Topps baseball. … When you think back to the original designs that were done on [founder] Sy Berger's kitchen table, to the way we're doing it now, everyone takes that that legacy to heart and it's an important moment for us. But at the same time, a lot of fun.”

As collectors know, the base design is only the start of any Topps offering. Also included in Series 1 are various subsets including Future Stars, an All-Topps Team, Training Grounds (related to Spring Training), Call to the Hall (featuring Cooperstown inductees), City Connect Swatch Collection autographs and Heavy Lumber autographs.

Signature Tunes, featuring players and the artists who perform their walk-up songs, is back, as is First Pitch, which highlights notable figures who delivered ceremonial first pitches last season. Dodgers fans will no doubt get a kick out of the base-card variations that show players doing their celebratory hip lock and “Freddie Dance” – Freeman’s hands-over-head, hula-hooping-hips gyration – moves after reaching safely.

And this year’s 35^th anniversary tribute series honors the colorful 1990 set. But it’s Imbriano’s simple yet bold design that carries Series 1.

“I come from a key art poster type of design world,” he said. “So that's also in my approach when making card designs: I kind of think of them as little posters in and of themselves.”

Little posters that are part of a larger legacy.

“I think Phil's design is amazing,” Luraschi said. “Fifty years from now, [collectors] should be able to look at your design and say the exact year it’s from, and this one nails that idea.”