Arizona Cardinals

The Cardinals have called numerous cities home over their 100-plus seasons in the NFL. The Cardinals first took flight in Racine, WI, just south of Milwaukee. In 1921, the team moved south to Chicago, where they would play through the 1959 season. During their time in the Second City, the Cards would experiment with different uniform designs and color palettes, starting with a burgundy and metallic gold look before lightening the red to cardinal in 1926. They would focus more on cardinal and white in 1929, keeping the standard tan pants of the time, before changing the helmets and pants to white for the 1937 season. Much of the tinkering with blue alternate jerseys and red helmets would end in 1958, two seasons before they moved to St. Louis. That 1960 season saw two firsts for the Cardinals franchise, as it was their first season in the Show Me State as well as their first season with the team’s longstanding cardinal head logo. Five seasons later, the team would add stripes to the sleeves of their road jerseys, and in 1970 they would start tinkering with outlining their jersey numbers in black. The number outlines would only catch on with the white jerseys with cardinal and black stripes on the sleeves. Those white jerseys would see the addition of the cardinal head logo to the sleeves in 1982. The Cards would move west to Phoenix for the 1988 season, adding the Arizona state flag over their sleeve stripes the following season. The Phoenix Cardinals would change their name again in 1994, becoming the Arizona Cardinals in an attempt to appeal to the entirety of their new home state. 1996 would see the Cardinals tweak their white jerseys once again, slimming down the sleeve stripes and moving the Arizona flag above the striping, where the cardinal head logo previously resided. The pants design would also change to a one-color double stripe with white stripes on cardinal red and cardinal red stripes on white. The Cardinals would go through a full redesign in 2005, their most significant changes since their time in Chicago. The cardinal head logo was made sleeker, while the uniforms were overhauled to include the abstract panels and piping the aughts were famous for. The team would add a black jersey with white numbers in 2010, and a black Color Rush uniform with red type in 2017. My Cardinals rebrand seeks a balance of old and new, pairing an aggressive full-body cardinal with a conservative block typeface. The revised color palette includes cardinal red and black, but adds copper as a nod to The Grand Canyon State’s mining history. The alternate logo consists of a football holding shape with the state’s sunburst-and-star design over an interlocking AZ. The full-body cardinal can also appear by itself, just as the interlocking AZ appears by itself of the coach’s caps. The current cardinal head logo is kept for use on the throwback-inspired uniforms. The typeface is a solid block serif with historical touches fitting of the League’s oldest franchise. The helmets are all new, representing one of the biggest changes of this redesign. The new helmets start with a cardinal red shell and the cardinal’s black face markings positioned toward the front of the helmet, mimicking the bird’s distinct head. The home jerseys are cardinal red with white numbers and the alternate logo on the left chest. Sublimated sunbursts illuminate the TV numbers, which are placed on the sleeves instead of the shoulders. The home jerseys are paired with white pants, with an option for copper pants that call back to the early Chicago teams as well as the history of the Copper State. The away jerseys swap the cardinal and white from the home jerseys, keeping the sublimated sleeve design. The away jerseys are paired with either cardinal or copper pants. The third, or alternate, uniforms go black with red type, representing the coloring of their mascot, unlike the team’s current black-and-white alternate uniforms. The throwback-inspired uniforms combine a few parts of the team’s Arizona history, with the alternate logo recolored like the state flag and placed over the sleeve striping along with single color numbers and the cardinal head logo placed on a white helmet shell with a grey facemask.