CHIEFS LOGO HISTORY
An Inspiration
Texans Helmet
1960
365
During the team’s three-year stint as the American Football League’s Dallas Texans from 1960-62, the club’s helmet logo featured the state of Texas in white with a gold star situated on the club’s home base in Dallas. Founder Lamar Hunt “borrowed” that concept from the ’52 Dallas Texans, a totally-unrelated NFL franchise that spent one undistinguished season playing in the Lone Star State before resurfacing as the Baltimore Colts in ’53. Prior to the inaugural AFL season in ’60, Hunt’s Texans were represented by a whirling, spur-clad, 10-gallon-hat-wearing character that was featured on various promotional items. That logo eventually gave way to a more polished football-toting gunslinger set over the state of Texas, a design created by Bob Taylor, a cartoonist for the now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald. Although never part of the club’s uniform, Taylor’s updated Texans logo adorned everything from the club’s stationery to the billboard outside the team’s offices. When the franchise moved to Kansas City in ’63, Taylor was commissioned to produce a new logo that remained strikingly similar to his original incarnation. Taylor’s new rendition featured a Native American figure running with the same stride and holding the pigskin in the same manner as the gunslinger with the states of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa and Arkansas serving as his backdrop. This logo was utilized prominently during the ’60s and was affixed to the club’s Swope Park headquarters on 63rd Street before the club moved to Arrowhead in ’72. A new design for the Chiefs helmet logo was also in order upon the franchise’s move to Mid-America. Hunt went back to the drawing board, seeking to give his franchise a logo that would once again provide an easily-recognizable link to its home locale. Hunt’s initial sketches, some of which were done on a napkin on a flight from Dallas to Kansas City, began with an interlocking “KC” inside a circle or an oval. That look was eventually refined to feature those intertwined letters inside an arrowhead. The resulting finished product remains one of the most distinctive logos in all of sports and has been proudly utilized by the team for more than 50 years.
1960-62
Circa 1960s
1963-present
@CHIEFS