Charles Adams, Art Ross and colours from a chain of food stores.

The Boston Bruins joined the National Hockey League in 1924, when the league decided to expand into the United States. English Wikipedia says that the year before, in 1923, the sports promoter Thomas Duggan had obtained options on three NHL franchises for American cities and sold one of them to Charles Adams, a Boston grocery owner. Adams’ opening move, according to the same account, was to hire Art Ross, a former player, as general manager.

The name came from that office. Wikipedia says Ross, working with his secretary, settled on “Bruins” as the team’s nickname. It also says the name went with the club’s original colours, brown and yellow, which were taken from Adams’ grocery chain, First National Stores.

Those colours shaped the early uniforms. In the opening season the Bruins wore brown sweaters, Wikipedia records, and the following season they switched to a white sweater with alternating brown and gold stripes, worn with beige pants and either gold or white socks. The earliest crest was a walking bear surrounded by the full team name, used from 1924 to 1932. After the 1932 season the bear gave way to a simple block “B.”

The palette changed in the mid-1930s. Starting with the 1935–36 season, Wikipedia says, the club replaced brown with black, wore gold socks full-time and switched to black pants. The “B” moved to the sleeves and the sweater number took its place on the front. Black and gold has been the core of the identity ever since, while brown has returned only for special occasions, such as the brown and gold variation of the 1948–49 design that the team wore for the 2010 Winter Classic.

The early home rink was the Boston Arena. From 1928 the Bruins played at the Boston Garden, and in 1995 they moved to the arena now called TD Garden.

From the Adams family to the Jacobs family.

Charles Adams owned the club until 1936, when, Wikipedia says, he transferred ownership to his son Weston Adams. Weston Adams remained majority owner until 1951, when the Boston Garden-Arena Corporation bought a controlling interest. Under the corporation, Walter A. Brown, who had founded the Boston Celtics basketball team, ran the Bruins from 1951 to 1964. Weston Adams then returned as team president, and in 1969 he was succeeded by his son, Weston Adams Jr.

A broadcaster followed. On 7 December 1973, Wikipedia records, Storer Broadcasting, owner of the Boston television station WSBK-TV, agreed a merger with the Garden-Arena Corporation that gave Storer full ownership of the Bruins. In August 1975 Storer sold the team to a group headed by Jeremy Jacobs, through Sportsystem Corporation, a company formed by Jacobs and his two brothers. The Jacobs family has owned the Bruins since 1975, and Jacobs has also served the league directly: Wikipedia says he was elected chairman of the NHL board of governors in June 2007.

The uniform kept moving while the owners changed. For much of the 1940s the white sweater carried gold numbers, and from 1940 to 1944 the club also wore a gold sweater with a script “Bruins” wordmark across the front. In 1955 the Spoked B moved onto the black sweater in reverse colours, and a gold sweater with the Spoked B on the front was added. A simple bear-head logo was introduced in 1977, and the overall design then stayed in place until 1995.

The 1995–96 season brought a new set with a thick contrasting stripe running from sleeve to sleeve, and a gold third sweater with a bear logo that Wikipedia calls the “Pooh Bear,” an homage to Winnie the Pooh, which the team wore until 2006. In 2007, on the Reebok Edge template, the club returned to elements of its 1970s look and brought back a redrawn version of the original walking bear as a shoulder patch. A centennial set followed for the 2023–24 season. The club’s mascot, Wikipedia notes, is Blades the Bruin, a costumed bear.

Design and documentation.

A hockey sweater carries its identity in a few fixed places. The crest sits square on the chest, sized to read from the upper rows of an arena and on a broadcast frame, so it tends to be built from heavy shapes, thick outlines and a small number of flat colours. Twill and embroidery limit fine detail, which pushes designers towards bold letterforms and simple silhouettes rather than thin lines or gradients.

Shoulder patches give a second, smaller mark room to work, often a secondary logo, a monogram or a city reference. Sleeve and hem stripes repeat the colour order in bands, and numbers and nameplates on the back usually follow a block or arched lettering style that has to stay legible at speed and from a distance.

Away from the sweater, the same marks travel onto rink graphics: centre-ice logos painted beneath the surface, dasher-board panels, scoreboards, tickets and arena signage. For a designer studying a hockey identity, the useful exercise is to look at how one crest holds up across all of these sizes, from a small pin or patch to centre ice.

A wheel for “The Hub,” redrawn in 1949, 1995, 2007 and 2025.

The Bruins’ primary mark is the Spoked B, an eight-spoked wheel with a letter “B” at its centre. Wikipedia says it has been the logo since 1948 and is a nod to Boston’s nickname, “The Hub.” It arrived on a new white sweater made for the club’s 25th anniversary: a gold “B” inside a black-spoked wheel, with the numbers “24” and “49” added to mark the founding year and the anniversary season. In 1949 the “B” was redrawn in block lettering, and that version, a black circle and “B” with gold spokes, set the pattern for the next four and a half decades.

Later changes were small. Wikipedia lists black borders and a gold outer circle added in 1995 and serifs on the “B” added in 2007. Writing in The Boston Globe on 23 June 2025, Michael Silverman described the latest refresh, unveiled in a video narrated by the actor Denis Leary along with a new slogan, “Built by Boston, Powered by Tradition.” The eight spokes linking the outer circle to a serif “B” stayed, he wrote, but the club now has two versions: a gold, black-outlined “B” with black spokes inside a gold circle, and the opposite colour scheme. The thin black outline introduced in 1995 was removed, which Silverman said gave the marks a cleaner look while recalling the sans-serif “B” and plain spokes of 1949 to 1995.

The Globe quoted Andrea Mazzarelli, the team’s vice president of marketing, who said that since 2007 the club had used one primary mark on both light and dark backgrounds, and was now going back to “a tandem of primary marks,” with the team guiding which version appears on which background. Wikipedia says the 2025–26 uniforms drew on the 1977–1995 set and carried an updated walking bear patch on the left shoulder, and that for the 2026 Stadium Series the club wore bright gold sweaters with a walking bear crest.

For a design guide, Boston Bruins shows how a single geometric mark can be adjusted for decades through outlines, serifs and colour reversals without losing its shape. Compare the NHL, the Montreal Canadiens and the Boston Red Sox. For this guide we use spoked gold, Bruin black and grocer brown with a heavy slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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