A neighbourhood club, second-hand jerseys and a colour name.

The Cardinals began as a neighbourhood team. The Pro Football Hall of Fame says the club traces its history to 1898, when Chris O’Brien formed the Morgan Athletic Club in Chicago. English Wikipedia describes the founders as a neighbourhood group on the city’s South Side, and O’Brien, a Chicago painting and building contractor, as the man who took the team over and moved it to Normal Field on Racine Avenue, where it played as the Racine Normals.

The name came from a set of used shirts. The Hall of Fame says that a few years later O’Brien bought used jerseys from the University of Chicago, described the faded maroon cloth as “Cardinal red”, and the team, then playing at 61st and Racine Street, became the Racine Street Cardinals. Wikipedia dates the switch from the Racine Normals to 1901. The colour, in other words, came before the bird: the club was named for the shade of its kit, and the cardinal as an animal arrived in the marks later.

The team was a charter member of the league that became the NFL. Wikipedia says the club joined the American Professional Football Association on 17 September 1920 as the Racine Cardinals and became the Chicago Cardinals in 1922, to avoid confusion with the Horlick-Racine Legion, which entered the league that year. The Hall of Fame says the Cardinals began a continuous period of family ownership in 1932, when Charles W. Bidwill bought the team, and the Bidwill family has owned the club since then.

Two moves followed. Wikipedia says the NFL allowed the Bidwills to take the team to St. Louis in 1960, where locals called it the “Big Red”, the “Gridbirds” or the “Football Cardinals” to tell it apart from the baseball club of the same name, whose history is in our St. Louis Cardinals brand guidelines. The Hall of Fame says William Bidwill moved the franchise again in 1988, choosing Phoenix, and the team played as the Phoenix Cardinals at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, on the Arizona State University campus. The name changed to the Arizona Cardinals in March 1994; Wikipedia gives the date as 17 March 1994.

From a perched bird to a sharper head.

The uniform has stayed close to its roots. Wikipedia says the team has worn cardinal red jerseys since O’Brien bought them, and that across long stretches of its history the set has been white helmets, white pants with red side stripes and either red or white jerseys. The bird came in stages. From 1947, Wikipedia says, a northern cardinal perched on the laces of a football appeared on printed material such as programmes and letterheads. After the move to St. Louis in 1960 the club added a drawing of a cardinal’s head to both sides of the helmet, and the print logo became a cartoon cardinal carrying a football in front of the Gateway Arch.

Arizona brought new details. Wikipedia says the state flag of Arizona was added to the sleeves in 1989, and red pants were worn with the white jerseys from 1990. For the league’s 75th-anniversary throwback programme in 1994, the club wore 1920s-style Chicago jerseys with an interlocking “CC”, three sleeve stripes and khaki pants. In 1996 black was removed as an accent colour and replaced with blue to match the state flag, and the cardinal head that had sat on the white jersey sleeve since 1982 was dropped as sleeves got shorter.

The 2005 redraw is the key moment in the modern identity. Wikipedia says the cardinal-head logo was updated to look sleeker and meaner, after fans had derisively called the previous bird a “parakeet”; black returned as an accent, and trim lines were added to the shoulders, sleeves and sides of the jerseys and pants. ABC News reported on 1 February 2009 that the change gave the bird a sharper beak, menacing eyes and some attitude. It quoted Shandon Melvin, then the NFL’s creative director, saying the club wanted to stay true to its long history while signalling a new direction as it moved into a new stadium, and calling the result “very much an evolutionary step, to make it look sleeker and faster.” Melvin added that more revolutionary ideas “felt too disconnected.”

Later sets built on that bird. Wikipedia says a black alternate jersey arrived in 2010, an all-black Color Rush set in 2017 and a black helmet in 2022. Before the 2023 season the club introduced new uniforms: all red at home with the state name on the front, all white on the road and all black as the alternate, with silver trim, the team name inside a silver sleeve stripe and helmets with silver flake. A tan “Rivalries” uniform followed for 2025, with sand speckles, copper-trimmed red numbers and a modified cardinal-head decal.

Design and documentation.

Professional football franchises are portable in a way that consumer brands usually are not. A team can keep its name, its colours and its helmet mark while changing cities, and the visual identity then has to work in a new market that did not grow up with it. Designers handling a relocation usually decide what to keep and what to localise: the nickname and the core mark often travel, while the city name, the stadium and the advertising change around them.

Colour is the other long-running thread. A shade retired in one decade can come back as an alternate uniform and then return as the primary look, and that kind of return is usually framed around heritage rather than novelty. The helmet is a compressed version of the brand, because a single mark on each side has to read clearly at distance and on screens of every size.

Stadiums add a further layer. Venue names, signage and wayfinding sit beside the team’s own mark, and when a team shares or moves venues, its identity has to hold its own against everything else on the building.

A campus bowl, a retractable roof and three names on one building.

The Cardinals spent their early Arizona seasons on a university campus. Wikipedia says the team played its home games at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe from 1988 until 2006. For much of that time, it says, the club wore white at home in the early part of the season, a practice tied to the heat of an Arizona autumn, and red returned as the full-time home colour once the team moved indoors.

The current venue has carried three names. Wikipedia says the stadium in Glendale, a suburb west of Phoenix, opened in 2006 as Cardinals Stadium, took the name University of Phoenix Stadium under a naming-rights deal that September, and was renamed State Farm Stadium in September 2018. It has a retractable roof and also hosts the annual Fiesta Bowl. The Hall of Fame also dates the stadium’s opening to 2006. Wikipedia adds that the team’s executive offices and training facility have stayed in Tempe and are due to move to north Phoenix in 2028.

The colour story ties the three cities together. The red started as a description of worn jerseys in Chicago, carried through the St. Louis decades alongside a baseball club with the same name, and in Arizona took on the state flag, lost black and then regained it. The 1994 rename swapped a city for a state, and the 2023 home uniform put the state name on the front of the jersey.

For a design guide, the Arizona Cardinals show how a name taken from a colour can outlast three cities, with a bird added to the helmet in 1960 and sharpened in 2005 rather than replaced. Compare the club’s old Chicago neighbour in our Chicago Bears brand guidelines, the league itself in our NFL brand guidelines and another Phoenix team in our Phoenix Suns brand guidelines. For this guide we use cardinal red, beak gold and black with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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