Pro Logo Designer Rebrands The Kansas City Chiefs

Today I'm gonna take a look

at the Chiefs' visual identity, dive into the history

of some Chiefs past logo designs,

and even take a crack at making a new logo myself.

[upbeat music]

This is a logo for the Kansas City Chiefs.

It's remained largely unchanged

since it was launched in 1963.

[pen whirring]

First introduced as a helmet design

and then eventually it became the primary logo in 1972.

So the logo itself was designed by Lamar Hunt,

the owner the team.

He was the one who moved the team from Dallas

to Kansas City.

He was heavily influenced by the San Francisco 49ers logo,

which is, you know, obvious if you look at it now.

The primary thing

that I think about when I see this mark

is the slab serif typography in the KC monogram.

So when we're talking about slab serif,

we're talking about these flourishes

at the end of the letters,

which in a slab serif are squared off.

You know, in a serif type face, IE Times New Roman,

they tend to be sharper,

they're a little more decorative.

In a slab serif, they're much more bold,

impactful, blockier.

That's kind of like the defining characteristic

of the typeface.

Or in the case of a sans serif, you have none of the above,

it just ends with a flat edge.

So aside from the specifics about the type style,

the thing that's interesting to me

about the dimensionality

is that it's not necessarily correct.

It doesn't make optical sense necessarily the way the shadow

is coming off of the C in this area, in this area,

versus the more straightforward shadow

that is just coming off of this area in the K,

they just feel a little bit, you know, disconnected

from how it would appear in real life, which is fine,

it has a little bit of that naivete.

It feels hand drawn and then at some point it was digitized

and there's a certain kind of like character

that comes with that.

But you know, I would say that's an area of opportunity

as we start to think about what we can do with it.

You have the actual arrowhead shape.

As much as that could be refined,

I understand why they did that,

it adds kind of like a human quality to it

and obviously reflects kind of like the roughness

of the edge of these arrowheads themselves.

Over the years,

certain things have become inconsistent with it

or treated in different ways depending on where it lives.

So in this case, you're seeing the logo

as it largely stands on the helmet.

It might feature a logo with a white outline around it.

What you are looking at here is the closed C version,

which has a flat bottom.

There is an open C version

where the C comes out a little bit

and it gets cut off without the flat edge.

That is something that even to this day,

there is an open C on the helmets

but does not exist anywhere else.

So for example, we have this helmet from 1971,

this helmet from 2024.

Interestingly, you can see that they both use

the open C, the primary logo however,

since 1972 has been the closed C logo.

It wasn't necessarily drawn this way

because of, you know, rounds and rounds

and rounds of revisions

and putting it through the lens

of what kind of like a corporate brand identity

needs to accomplish.

It was more for the spirit of it

and I think that adds to the character

and frankly like what people love about it.

So I think that this exercise

in and of itself is probably gonna ruffle some feathers

because there's an idea of how logos

have that kind of like built in imperfection

and that makes it what you know and you love.

So I think that for me, part of the challenge

of this is you don't wanna ruin that spirit,

but you instead want to think what can you do

to, you know, add to it.

So from 1960 to 62, the Dallas Texans,

this was the original iteration of the team,

the mascot itself was drawn by someone who apparently worked

for a local newspaper in Dallas as a cartoonist.

Interesting to look at it now

because it feels a little folksy

and just less rigid

than what we think about as sports logos.

But this is pretty common

if you look at like, you know,

old baseball teams, old football teams.

So the main two elements,

obviously you've got your cowboy, state of Texas

and then he's holding a football, beyond that,

there's not much of a story to be told here.

It's pretty straightforward.

Feels a little more like something

that could just be for any local sports team.

Also, you know, to be clear,

the NFL didn't even exist at the time of this.

The Dallas Texans played in the AFL,

which merged with the NFL's former version in 1970,

thanks in part to Lamar Hunt.

So one thing you will notice is the color,

even though the logo itself has nothing to do

with what's happening now in 2025,

color has remained largely unchanged

with red being the dominant color.

From 1963 to 1971,

after the team moves to Kansas City,

this is a logo that they end up with.

It's an evolution obviously from when they were in Dallas.

The same artist had drawn the logo for Lamar Hunt.

It wasn't clear that they were gonna be called

the Chiefs at the time.

Lamar had actually pitched

to call them the Kansas City Texans

and was talked out of that by a member of his team.

The name The Chiefs came from the mayor

of Kansas City at the time, who they called The Chief.

With that, you know, they ended up going with this mascot.

So for a variety of reasons this would not fly today.

Teams much like the Washington commanders,

the Cleveland Guardians,

they've all had to contend with this.

When they moved to Kansas City,

it's a little bit funny

now, part of it is the, you know,

the orientation of the city.

Rather than just picking Missouri

much like they went with Texas here,

they have kind of like a mess

of about what is this, six states behind the logo.

And with that, you know, obviously,

they have their mascot in the acts

you have the beginnings of what you could say

is something that's going to evolve

eventually into the arrowhead that we know now.

And then aside from that, one other dominant feature

of this you can see is still you have your red color

and you have your gold.

The gold did evolve a little bit over time,

became brighter, but the red obviously

was still the anchor point.

Okay, so and then in here you have the beginnings

of what we'll call a monogram.

Monogram is a collection of letters

that overlap generally speaking

and build kind of like a unique symbol

based on those letter forms.

Here you have the beginnings of the KC

that will evolve into the logo that we know now.

So that's a logo history.

We touched briefly on the commanders,

but I think we should take a minute

to look at how they dealt with a similar challenge.

[page whirring]

So in 2022, this is the identity

that the commanders came up with.

For a variety of obvious reasons,

they needed to change a name.

I mean look like these are very complicated conversations,

I'm sure there was a lot of deliberation.

They ended up landing on the commanders,

which built the base for kind of what I would say

is like a strong identity.

However, an identity

that really just to me it lacks a cultural anchor.

The way that this W was translated

into kind of like a larger type system, it feels modern.

Maybe you could say there's some like forward momentum here.

It's based in this idea of a stencil typeface.

Much like when you have to like spray paint

initials onto something.

I have my own personal issues with stenciling type.

I think sometimes it's a little bit of a cliche

and it can just fall into this kind of like attempt

to make something feel iconic and feel unique.

But again, it's not really saying anything.

But just to circle back on like what I think

they were really anchoring this in, the color.

So we've taken a look at a recent rebrand

that maybe fell a little bit short.

What I'd like to do now is take a look at one

that I think anchors itself in history well

and was executed perfectly.

[page whirring]

So this was done in 2024 by House Industries.

House is undoubtedly the masters

of you know, a lot of different things.

Adding character to typography

and figuring out how to take the bones of something

and make it work the best that it can.

A notable, you know, element

of the way the King's logo has worked

for a long time is the slanted lettering.

They decreased the amount that it was italicized

and they reworked all of these lines

that were coming off the letters.

They made the letters feel a little bit bolder.

They rebuilt this lettering to make it all tie together.

And then with the Crown, this was an update

to an existing crown that existed in an old logo.

So the logo on the whole was only undertaken

because they did a throwback jersey

that had a vintage brand mark on it

and it ended up being so well loved

that they ended up using that now moving forward.

[page whirring]

I think it's time for us to start our rebrand.

So I think the logo overall could benefit

from a little more room.

This area just gets totally swallowed up

and you lose all sense of dimension.

You lose the kind of like where the K

and the C are coming together.

The approach, in my opinion is not the full scale rebrand,

but really to think about what's working

with the logo right now.

What do people love?

Tighten up some of the inconsistencies

that it crept in over the years.

How does that then extend out into a larger brand world

that brings in the marketing

and all the other pieces of the brand on a whole,

same as the last episode

when we were working on the Clippers,

the goal here isn't to build the perfect proportions

right now, I'm just trying

to give myself a starting point so that I understand

what I'm trying to accomplish when I get to the computer.

Sometimes that's math, sometimes that's eyeballing it

and having to optically correct things

so that they feel right more than they measure correctly.

Lettering is more of a art form than a science.

I mean it's a little bit of both

but I would say more so than a lot of graphic design.

The actual drawing of the letter forms

is something that often is imperfect.

The next step from here will be going on a little bit

of a typeface hunt to try to find something

that works not just for this mark,

but also you know, how does that apply

to the larger chiefs brand system.

Right now the chief's word mark is something

that has this seventies pastiche, I would say,

and the Arrowhead Stadium Mark

follows a similar type styles

a chiefs word mark, but feels oddly different.

So what you end up with is it's a brand,

but it's just a collection of a bunch of different ideas

that somehow feel disparate

and not as linked together as they could be.

Not perfect, but for me that's the basic framework

for how I wanna approach the KC.

Now the other consideration

and where we'll probably move from here,

the relationship of this mark to the arrowhead shape,

then we'll go from there on to the computer.

[page whirring]

The existing Arrowhead meets the edges

of the letter forms on both sides.

The biggest area of opportunity for me

is just trying to open it up,

give a little more breathing room

around the K in the C,

protecting the monogram a little bit more.

[upbeat music]

Again, this is not totally perfect,

but I think this gives me a good starting point

to understand sort of like the basic relationship

of where I want to take the monogram

within the arrowhead shape.

Let's get it into the computer.

This book is the photo lettering one line manual styles.

This serves as a way to navigate

all of the different typeface families

that are a part of the photo lettering family.

Photo Lettering Inc is the name of a company

that was founded in New York City,

I believe it was founded in the sixties.

Even though this is way pre-computer,

I still use it as a way to navigate

and wrap my head

around just what the possibilities are

within each of these different type families.

These start to get a little too expressive,

a little too condensed

and you can see it starts to get

a little too fancy, a little too flourished,

and we're looking for something that's more straightforward

and a little bit more like brutal

in how geometric it is.

So I think this is a good reference for the style

of about what we're looking for.

We're not gonna be able to get this exact piece of type,

but there is a type foundry by the name of commercial type

that has done a really good job

of sort of like finding these historical references

and updating them and I believe

that they have one that I could work with.

Antique number six, you can see there like stylistically

it's pretty close

because they don't offer an extended weight of this.

What I'd have to do is use this as a framework,

but then I can kind of like, you know, adjust it

and rebuild the letter, but use this as the bones,

the slab syrups are a little longer than I need them to be.

That's an easy adjustment to make.

But the proportion in how the joints

of these letters are working

is actually exactly what I'm looking for.

Let's see, the bold gets a little too dense,

so I'm gonna stick with the medium potentially sacrilegious

in terms of type setting here.

But basically what I'm gonna do

is I am just going to stretch the type out.

Generally speaking, you would never really wanna stretch

the typography either vertically or horizontally

because the proportions of those letters,

again, going back to what I was saying

about type design being an art form,

those are built with extremely specific nuances in mind.

But when it comes to what we're doing here,

it's really just giving me the proportional width

that I'm looking for and then I'm gonna have

to go into the individual letters and not redraw them,

but adjust them so that they work the way I need them to.

Now here, this is a super important part

is I wanna make sure that I'm opening up

that interior so that when I have my C crossing through,

that it has enough space to breathe.

As far as I'm concerned,

one of the things that is not really necessary

in this exercise is to be worrying

about the basic colors of the team.

I don't think that has anything to do

with any issues that we have here.

Simple stroke on it.

So the way that I'm gonna try

to build the shadow in this one,

which is gonna be different than the way

the shadow is drawn in on the existing logo

is I'm gonna build it just true based on actual math

so that every angle of the shadow

can follow the exact same dimensions.

Okay, I'm feeling good about where we're at

with the KC monogram.

Let's move on to the arrowhead shape.

Rather than just draw one out of thin air,

what I wanted to try to do was just find an image

that I could use as a starting shape, right?

So the edges on this one are gonna be a mess.

Now what I'm gonna do as well

is even just while I'm sketching it out,

I'm gonna throw it on the red background

because I think the logo very rarely just appears

on a white background and I don't wanna be judging

how this is working without taking that into account.

My gut is that the primary use case of this logo

should be with the white outline.

The way it appears on the helmet,

I can understand why they wouldn't do that.

It keeps it somehow simpler,

but at the same time, this gives me an opportunity

to play with the outline round the letters

as well as the outline that holds the arrowhead shape

and how those can have a relationship to each other.

Yeah, I think that's pretty good.

There's still some more work that I'm gonna keep doing

to that one, but I think for now we got a good thing

to start is the base for the rest of the letters.

[gentle music]

One thing that I love about the way

that this type family works

is that the different weights sort of have a different vibe

and I think you know, one way

to have a complimentary word mark

without going to the extreme that the current word mark has,

where it's a entirely different family,

entirely different sort of aesthetic,

is to just lean into the heavier weights of this,

which give a little bit of like a different flavor.

Now I think for the purposes of this though,

I want it to be a little deeper.

I want more of a shadow on it

because I'm imagining this living, you know,

in the end zone, maybe somewhere in the uniform.

But I want it to, you know, have a little bit

of like a stronger base.

The main thing I would say about the Chiefs jerseys,

there's actually relatively little branding for me.

The yellow around the numbers gets lost

and then there's this more current jersey

that includes the little tribute patch for Lamar Hunt.

And even though these jerseys are two decades apart,

they largely are exactly the same.

You know, how do we want to approach the numbers?

How do we want to approach any other inclusion of branding?

I think that's where we can start to have some fun.

The main challenge for me

is gonna be to figure out one other way

to bring in brand recognition into the uniforms.

The existing Kansas City Chiefs uniforms look really good.

But I think that if we're gonna go through all this trouble

of trying to bring the word mark into this world,

think about different ways that we can use color.

I think that there is an opportunity

to maybe do something on the helmet,

including play with a color stripe,

which is something that some teams play with

but Kansas City just has classically not done.

So one thing that I would push overall is for the jerseys,

just to feel a little bit somehow simpler.

Right now there's a lot

of different color blocking happening, the way that the red

and the white and there's just like some contrast issues

and I think that when I look at the palette,

it feels like if things flattened out a little bit more

and just became a little more like specifically red dominant

across the board, it might just help

to simplify things a little bit.

Taking some liberties here.

Now for the number, I'm staying a little more traditional

varsity style, outline in black, which is a little bit weird

because it makes it stand out.

But I like the idea of the contrast

of that tying back to the KC logo

and then a little bit more reduced

in where the yellow color comes in

because I think that too much of that

and it just kind of like, to me,

it throws it off a little bit.

Think staying a little more red dominant

makes for just like a newer look.

To recap the things that were fixed here,

we get a lot less

of Mark getting swallowed up in losing the space within.

But then also around the KC,

try to even out the strokes within the letter forms

as the mark reduces, gets smaller on the field,

you don't lose kind of like the definition

of the letter forms in the monogram in the middle.

So the other thing I wanted to do

is bring consistency to the word marks.

I really like the way that this chief's mark goes back

and speaks to the logo and where we're ending up.

I like that the shadow operates in the same angle

and with the same treatment.

It has its own kind of like necessary depth.

So it does have its own little touch, which was the goal.

One thing also that the chief's current identity

does not include is a lockup with Kansas City.

You know, this is by no means final,

but I think that the type family

that we're choosing here really creates an opportunity

to create a consistent treatment

as a way of kind of like instilling some pride in place.

One other little Easter egg that I liked

is that the C in this typeface has that same sort

of openness from the helmet logo as it exists right now.

So even if we were to go in

and update the logo, I like that this mark

maintains a little bit of that

kind of like historical nod and reference.

With the exact same style of the chief's word mark,

I think you could very easily just bring the Arrowhead brand

into the same family as everything else.

So rather than having this sort of like disparate kit

of parts where everything feels somehow disconnected

from each other, I think that there is a real opportunity

to bring all the stuff into the same place

from the same brand language and tie it all together.

Thank you for watching, hope you enjoyed it

and let us know what team you want us

to take a look at next.