Los Angeles Kings Unveil New Logos, Modernized Take on ’90s Classic

The Los Angeles Kings are goin’ back to the ’90s, kids!

This morning, the Kings unveiled their new, old logo via their social media channels, one day after posting a teaser graphic simply showing the outline of the logo.

It’s a throwback, mostly, to what the club wore from 1988 to 1998, the so-called “Chevrolet Logo” (sorry, it’ll always be the “Gretzky logo” to me), with some noticeable updates throughout. The typeface for both the “LOS ANGELES” and “KINGS” have been changed, the crown at the bottom has been replaced with the sweater crest of the original 1967 Kings, and the shape of the logo itself is now more vertical with less of an angle on either side.

“When we dropped the 90’s heritage jersey that we were going to wear on the ice for the first time in a long time, and we unveiled that really cool video that went out, and it was wildly popular by the fans that it was going to come back, and then COVID happened, put a complete pause on it, but we saw the popularity and demand for that brand and jersey,” Los Angeles Kings’ COO Kelly Cheeseman told the team’s own podcast (how’d they score that exclusive?!) “Then, during that period, we transitioned into a new merchandise direction and look and feel and the fans spoke and the players were wildly excited about wearing that jersey.”

“When you go back to the early crown, it was always multicolour, so the first thing you’ve got to do is break that down to one colour and by doing that, it just presents a whole new landscape of what we call colour problems,” Andy Cruz from House Industries, the company that worked on the rebranding, shared with the podcast. “Not colour like multiple colours, but like when you look at something black and white, there’s a density to how much black and how much white there is, and that’s what we use to start to measure, okay, if it goes big, it goes small, should there be more jewels, less jewels, is it getting bunched up, loosen it up, so that was the real colour issue that we had.”

The overall brand family for the new Kings logo includes the primary that we’ve already seen, a version to be used on a dark background which includes an inverse of the outlines (a thin black followed by a thicker white rather than the white to black). The new alternate/secondary logo is the updated 1967 sweater crown that is also used within the primary logo, and finally, a series of three new wordmark logos, the same typeface as the primary logo, but with a neat little nod to descending “K” that was used on the original KINGS logo (see below):

There is no word on when the new uniforms will be released, but — as always—they should come sometime before the NHL Draft, which will be held one week from tomorrow.