1981 Fleer was a bad set, along with 1981 Donruss. But over time, the design grew on me at least a little (even though many of the photos were atrocious).

As much as I like reusing designs, I don't know quite how you could take the 1981 Fleer design and make it worse, but they pulled it off completely here.

The massive Fleer Platinum logo looks terrible.

The color choices are more vibrant and the shield under the player name is now team color-coded. But it looks terrible - especially with the black text no longer popping atop the yellow background.

The baseball has entered the uncanny valley. It's much more "realistic" looking than in the 1981 set, but "realistic" is not better. It looks much worse with the 1981 set at least pulling off an icon-style baseball. They may not have been actually trying to achieve that back in 1981 (it may have been a limitation of their available technology), but it frankly looks many times better than the 2001 version.

All the text on the front of the card is worse, and all of it different for no real apparent reason. The team name is on a different slant, it's no longer team color-coded. The player name and position were easier to read in the 1981 version.

I don't mind the 1987 style backs however. It's odd seeing them on a 1981 style card but for long time Fleer fans, the backs were quite similar from 1983-1992 that the portrait style with an infographic on the bottom was a familiar sight nearly any year you got (except for 1981 and 1982 of course).