The Simplification of NFL Team Logos
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San Francisco 49ers
The San Francisco 49ers logo had a major redesign during the television
era. The 1946 logo was a caricature of a gold miner from the 1848 California
Gold Rush dressed in red and white and firing pistols in each hand. The 1968
logo, now in the television era, is simply a letter-based logo with the initials of
“SF” for San Francisco. The sense of the rough and tumble 49er was divorced
from the brand. The 49er is, thus, not projected as rootin’-tootin’, gun-firing
crazy man. The new logo of 1968 is set within the simple oval shape. It loses the
complex multi-directionality of the gun-slinging miner and substitutes the
simpler left-to-right direction of the SF lettering. The audience can easily read
the serif style letters, even though they are more complex than simple block
letters. The transition from the representative iconic image to a purely symbolic
logo is quite dramatic. The new logo is also very easily seen on camera
compared to the o riginal logo. The current logo enhances the SF with a gold
oval within the black border. The overall effect is an artistic simplification of the
abbreviated letters.
Philadelphia Eagles
The Philadelphia Eagles have transformed their logo from an image to what
is primarily a word. The early logos were an iconic representation of a Kelly
green eagle. In 1973, the team made the logo into half word, half image, thus
combining iconic with symbolic imagery. The eagle was large and towered over
letters “Philadelphia EAGLES.” In the 1996 incarnation, the logo emphasized
the word “Eagles,” covering only the head of the eagle. The 1996 logo is more
television friendly than the 1973 version, and presents a cleaner graphic style
than the others. They are the Eagles both verbally and visually.
The team never used any of these logos on the helmet, rather relegated them
to uniforms and other team paraphernalia. The helmet logo, used since the
1950s, consists of a pair of eagle wings emanating from the front of the helmet
and sweeping back along the sides. An early version of the helmet was green
with silver wings. The contrast in color would make for good black-and-white
television viewing. The primary logo has remained relatively complex over the
years and with the addition of words in small type, has become more complex in
recent years.
Conclusions
That professional football logos have changed is undeniable. How and why
they changed was the focus of this research. Football logos follow a general
trend toward simplicity. We speculated that television of the 1960s was a major
cause of the changes we see in professional football logos. George McCaskey,
an expert on the subject, agreed, but also indicated that it is difficult to
determine how and why logos were designed and changed over the years. “Back
in the day, in the early days of the National Football League teams were really
struggling just to get by,” he said. “I don’t think they gave a lot of thought to,
‘here we need to preserve this discussion for the ages’” (G. McCaskey, personal