Chiefs Primary Logo
It is only right that we have a logo history page for a franchise that has been around for six decades. Many fans don’t realize that the Kansas City Chiefs franchise started in Dallas as the Dallas Texans. After only three years, the franchise would make Kansas City their place of residence. The Kansas City Chiefs won three championships before the AFL-NFL merger and the Lombardi trophy twice. No Chiefs fan has to be reminded of how fortunate they were to witness great players Priest Holmes and Tony Gonzalez or how fortunate to have great players such as Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
As you’ll see, the Kansas City Chiefs logo history is pretty much dominated by one of the most distinctive logos in all of the professional sports. The Kansas City Chiefs have used it for five decades. The interlocking of the “KC” wordmark gives it a distinctive logo that few logos could surpass.
However, Chiefs fans will take a trip down memory lane as they will get to view distinguished logos that feature a Native American and a gunslinger holding footballs.
1972 - Present
The Chiefs logo is a arrowhead design originally sketched by Lamar Hunt on a napkin. Hunt’s sketches, 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. Hunt’s inspiration for the interlocking “KC” design was the “SF” inside of an oval on the San Francisco 49ers helmets. Unlike the 49ers’ logo, Kansas City’s overlapping initials appear inside a white arrowhead instead of an oval and are surrounded by a thick chipped looking black border.
1963 - 1971
When the franchise moved to Kansas City in 1963, Bob 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 and a red tomahawk with the states of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Iowa and Arkansas serving as his backdrop.
1960 -1962
The American Football League’s Dallas Texans in 1960, featured a polished football toting gunslinger set over the state of Texas in red. The gunslinger is wearing cowboy boots and hat carrying a football and a gun. A design created by Bob Taylor, a cartoonist for the now defunct Dallas Times Herald.