Welcome to Orange Country
Today, the Anaheim Ducks took us all the way back, with one bright orange eye on the future, as the team officially unveiled its new logos and uniforms for the upcoming 2024-25 National Hockey League season.
It’s a look heavily reminiscent of the old Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, mixed with the colours and logos of today’s Anaheim Ducks, cleaned up and modernized throughout to bring everything up to today’s design trends and tastes. The “Wild Wing” goalie mask is back, but not quite the same. The triangle, oval, and crossed sticks are back, too, but again, not quite the same. Even the “D” logo used since 2006 is sticking around… and you guessed it, it’s not quite the same as before. Everything’s gotten a shiny new refresh, including the colour scheme, which saw a change to the shade of orange.
“The process was probably close to four years long and started with conversations about coming up on our 30th anniversary [in 2023],” said Merit Tully, the Ducks VP of Marketing, in a recent call with SportsLogos.Net. “We looked at fan sentiment about our marks and our team, which made it easier to look at the history of who we’ve been, who we were at that time, and the popularity surrounding those earlier marks. There was a good and healthy dialogue about whether we should return to the original look or try something new. It was healthy, but it was very quick. When you look at team logos, the great teams in our league and around sports aren’t substantially changing their look and feel. Going from one thing to the next doesn’t feel like the organization we want to be.”
The Ducks worked closely with the NHL, Fanatics, and Jillian Reddin, the daughter of Ducks owners Henry and Susan Samueli. According to Tully, Reddin, who has a background in design, was “instrumental in putting this new look together.”
“We worked with the league and the design team at Fanatics to put it all together over the past couple of years. Jillian was very involved, and we made sure that every detail was just right to honour the legacy and move forward with a fresh look. Working with Fanatics, we aimed to modernize the logo while preserving its iconic elements. It was a collective effort to ensure that the new look would be well-received.”
While the original Mighty Ducks logo was revived, the dark purple and jade colour scheme from that same era was not. Instead, the Ducks opted to run with orange as the club’s primary colour going forward, with black and gold serving as secondary colours, a move meant to double-down on the Ducks being the team to represent Orange County.
“After some fan surveys related to the original colours as well as the orange that we’ve worn as a third jersey, we found there are people who are adamant about the original colours being the best. But there’s also a group that really loves the orange as the look of our franchise and this next step in our maturity. We want to be Orange County’s team, and what better way to lean into that than by using the colour orange? It dates back to the early 1900s when this area was filled with orange groves.”
This new version of the goalie mask logo, which I suppose we can call Wild Wing 2.0, shares many of the same features as the one we saw back from 1993 through 2006 (and then again as a third jersey logo starting in 2015), but the differences are there. The most instantly noticeable change (beyond the colour scheme) is the addition of an orange eye to the mask to give the logo an “unexpected aggression,” as well as some additional options for isolating elements on their own. The thickness of the lines throughout the mask is bolder and sharper, and some of the additional silver shading present in 1993 has been eliminated, especially in the holes of the mask, to simplify the overall look. The eyebrow area of the mask is quite thicker than before, and with a higher arch, a little nod to the waves of the nearby Pacific Ocean, giving the logo another tie-in to Southern California.
“We have a tremendous reverence for the original Mighty Ducks mark. Disney designed it, and Disney does pretty good design work! It has stood the test of time and found its way into pop culture, not only through hockey but also in general fashion and sports culture. We wanted to be very careful to ensure that the pieces of that original mark carried over.”
Behind the mask, the triangle is back but now in gold rather than the original jade. The two crossed hockey sticks return as well, in orange and with new bevelling applied and each blade flat on the ice instead of angled up. The white tape on the blades of each stick have also been updated slightly, maintaining the “W” design on each.
Wait… what “W” design?
“The stick tape in the original logo had ‘WW’ for Wild Wing, our mascot,” Tully revealed, blowing my mind while simultaneously raising my eyebrow skeptically. “We wanted to preserve it for the core fans who know about it. We thought, even though it’s not an Easter egg that many people know about, it was something we wanted to keep for the fans who do know.”
Well, now we all know.
The “D” logo, used by the club since 2006, is back as well, also with updates. It’s been condensed a bit, the stroke along the bottom is gone, some extra lines have been removed, and the overall balance of the logo has been adjusted. As this design was part of the logo that was worn on the chest of the Ducks’ sweaters during their one and only Stanley Cup championship in 2007, it’s one which is critical to the overall history of the team and thus gets carried into the future identity of the team.
As for the uniforms, orange dominates, hammering home the idea of representing Orange County.
For home games, it’s all orange: orange helmet, orange jersey, orange pants, orange socks. Straight striping around the waist starts with a thicker black stripe at the bottom, with thin gold, white, and black above. Diagonal striping is on each sleeve, similar to the original Mighty Ducks uniform, in this same black/gold/white/black pattern. The new Ducks logo is centred on the chest below an orange and black collar; the updated “D” logo is on each shoulder. On the inside back collar is “DUCKS HOCKEY” in orange on black.
On the road, the white jerseys are paired with a white helmet, orange pants, and white socks. An orange shoulder yoke frames an orange and black collar. Like the home set, the striping around the waist is straight, but orange is used as the bottom stripe colour rather than black. This same pattern repeats on the diagonally striped sleeves.
There’s a new font for the player’s name and numbers, developed using inspiration from the Citrus industry that once dominated the region and their marketing materials of the era, as well as some of the Art Deco architecture found throughout Orange County. The numbers on the home orange jerseys are white with gold and black drop shadowing. On the road whites, the numbers are orange with the same gold and black shadow.
Finally, the colours. The orange the Ducks used last year — which was the same shade of orange as the New York Islanders — has been darkened a bit and is now the exact same shade as the Edmonton Oilers and Philadelphia Flyers. This makes me wonder if the NHL or Fanatics is trying to get teams to use single shade of orange across the board (and whether this means the Islanders are next). Gold, black, and white are retained from last year, while silver is gone completely from the Ducks’ colour scheme.
The Ducks are the latest in a series of teams re-embracing looks they once abandoned in favour of new directions. In the NHL over the last decade, we’ve seen the Arizona Coyotes, Buffalo Sabres, Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Ottawa Senators, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Toronto Maple Leafs all turn back the clock. Just last week, the Los Angeles Kings did just as the Ducks have done by modernizing their look from the 1990s to bring it into the 21st Century. Universally, this tactic has worked out well for those teams who have used it, with many fans and players expressing their fondness for the brighter colours and original team logos of the past.
The original Mighty Ducks of Anaheim logo was designed by Disney artists Tony Cipriano and Fred Tio and was first presented to the world by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman on NBC’s Today Show on June 7, 1993. Disney produced approximately one thousand logo concepts for the inaugural look before settling on a “Goofy-ized” Jason mask from Friday the 13th, as Disney chairman Michael Eisner put it at the time. The logo was immediately a hit at retail, with the Mighty Ducks setting league-wide sales records and topping the North American sports charts (not just amongst NHL teams, but all pro leagues) before ever playing a single game.
Disney sold the Mighty Ducks to the Samuelis in 2005, after which the new owners investigated the possibility of a name change. Two-thirds of season ticket holders polled said they wanted the club to be renamed, and the club briefly considered going with the names Anaheim Bears or Anaheim Condors. Finally, on January 26, 2006, they announced they were shortening the name to become the Anaheim Ducks starting with the 2006-07 season.
With the return to the old Mighty Ducks-style logo, would the team consider returning to the original name, too?
“Our goal as part of our refreshed brand identity is to focus on the future of where we are going and lean heavily into our locale. Anaheim Ducks honours that commitment to representing Orange County,” Tully told me. “We still have strong ties to the ‘mighty’ designation, with marketing tie-ins and branding that don’t include our team name.”
We’ll get our first look at the new Ducks logo and uniform in an official capacity at this weekend’s NHL Draft in Las Vegas when the club will present the new sweater to their first-round pick, #3 overall. They’ll make their on-ice debut on Tuesday, September 24, when the Ducks visit the San Jose Sharks for a preseason game before we get a look at their all-orange home set two days later.
LINK: Anaheim Ducks all-time logo and uniform history
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