WHO IS ASKING FOR YOUR ATHLETE'S PHOTOS.
A designer in Lithuania, three professional labs in the US, and a registry that outlives the season.
- Name
- John Birch
- Role
- Designer and founder
- Contact
- hello@gamedayedition.com
Game Day Edition started with a simple observation: kids who love their sport end up with hundreds of photos on a phone and nothing on their wall.
So that is what we make. You send the photos you already have — a few clear shots of your athlete. We design a poster and a set of collectible trading cards around them: their name, their number where the sport has one, their team colors, their season. Then we print them properly, square-cut on real card stock, the way a card is supposed to feel in a kid's hand.
What makes it different. Every piece is composed for the athlete in it — the crop, the light, the type, the color. Six finishes, each with its own materials and mood, from a floodlit stadium at night to high-contrast chrome. Seventeen sports, from basketball and football to gymnastics, wrestling and pickleball.
How it is made. Each piece is designed here, not pulled off a shelf. We use AI imaging tools as part of the creative process, and every composition, likeness, spelling, color and detail is reviewed and finished by a person before it reaches you. If it does not look like your athlete, it does not ship. Nothing goes to print until you have seen it. You get a proof first. If something is wrong — the number, the spelling, the crop — it gets fixed before anything is printed.
About your photos. We ask for 4 to 10 photos and nothing else. No date of birth, no home address, no school name. Your athlete's photos are used for your order and for nothing else. They are never posted, shared, or used to promote this studio unless you give permission separately, after the work is done. And if the photos you have are not strong enough to do the job well, we will tell you before any art is made.
Who it is for. Senior nights. End-of-season gifts. Grandparents who want something for the wall that is not a school portrait. First-year players and last-year players. Adults who still compete.
I put everything I know — design and the AI process behind it — into one thing: making a kid look and feel the way they would after a professional photoshoot, on their own card and poster. A gift nobody else has.
A CARD WITHOUT A RECORD IS A PHOTO PRINT.
A trading card is a claim: this player, this season, this edition. A photo print makes no claim; it is just a nice picture. That is why every card we make carries its registered card ID on the back and opens its own page here — the edition, the finish, the season, the stats, the date it was registered. One registered edition per athlete, per finish, per season. Physical cards are not individually numbered; the record is the registration, not a serial. We keep every registered page online for at least five years from the order, and if the studio ever winds down we keep the registry resolving for that period or tell you how to keep a copy. The domain is protected against transfer and renews on its own. A kid who scans the card in 2031 should see what their parent saw in 2026.
WHY YOU SEE IT FIRST.
Every edition goes through the same six checks: a look at the photos you send, which says which of them can carry the likeness; a drawing of the uniform, copied from those photos; a reference set of your athlete — three views — that you approve before a single pose is made; four shots built from that reference set; a side-by-side check, where every crest, number and mark on a shot has to match that reference set and the face has to measure as the same person; and a watermarked proof you approve before anything prints. About fifty images are made for one athlete. Four ship. The rest are the ones we throw away — the uniform that changed between shots, the shot that drifted away from the reference set — and they are the reason the promise can say what it says.
INDEPENDENT, AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR YOUR CREST.
Game Day Edition is an independent custom design studio. We are not affiliated with any professional league, team, school or trading-card company, and we do not reproduce protected professional league or governing-body marks.
We never reproduce league or governing-body marks (NFL, FIFA, NCAA, Olympic). Your school or club's own crest — yes, exactly as you send it.
Your school or club’s own crest is yours to use and ours to copy exactly; a league mark is neither.
DESIGNED IN LITHUANIA. PRINTED IN THE US.
Every edition is designed at the studio in Lithuania and printed by professional labs in the United States:
- Professional photo print lab, Santa Cruz CA
- the 12- and 24-card sets, with the printed certificate
- Print-on-demand poster printing partner, Charlotte NC
- 18 × 24 and 24 × 36 posters, with the printed certificate
Labs receive only the finished artwork and a shipping address — never your photos. Color correction is switched off at the lab: what you approved is what prints.
Game Day Edition is an independent custom design studio operated from Lithuania. hello@gamedayedition.com
THE NUMBERS THAT ARE TRUE TODAY.
- Never posted without your OK
- Deleted after delivery, on a schedule you can see
- Parent/guardian consent required