A newspaper nickname that the club adopted.

The Chicago Cubs began in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings, according to English Wikipedia, and six years later joined the National League as a charter member under the owner William Hulbert. Hulbert signed the pitcher Albert Spalding before that first league season, and Wikipedia says Spalding, who had left playing to start the sporting-goods business that carries his name, later took over the ownership of the club.

The team went through several names before the one it carries now. Wikipedia says that by 1890 it had become known as the Colts, sometimes “Anson’s Colts”, after the player-manager Adrian “Cap” Anson, and that when Anson was released in 1897 local newspaper reporters began calling the team the Orphans. The old White Stockings name did not stay in the family. When the American League formed as a rival after the 1900 season, a new club on the city’s South Side adopted it, and it was eventually shortened to White Sox.

The name Cubs started in the press. Wikipedia says that in 1902, the year Spalding sold the club to Jim Hart, the Chicago Daily News called the franchise the Cubs in reference to the youth of its roster, and that the club officially took the name five years later, in 1907. The young bear has been with the club since. Wikipedia says a bear cub has been used in the club’s imagery since the early 1900s, and that the team introduced Clark, a young bear cub, as its official costumed mascot on 13 January 2014.

The club’s home is as much a part of its identity as its name. Wikipedia says the Cubs played their first home game at what was then Weeghman Park, built in 1914 for the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, on 20 April 1916, after the lunch-counter owner Charles Weeghman and the advertising executive Albert Lasker took control of the club and moved it from the West Side Grounds. The park was renamed Wrigley Field in November 1926. On 19 November 2020 the U.S. Department of the Interior announced that Wrigley Field had been designated a National Historic Landmark, noting in its release that the ballpark was built in 1914 and has been the Cubs’ home since 1916.

Chewing gum, a newspaper and a family.

For six decades the club belonged to a chewing-gum family. The New York Times reported on 17 June 1981 that William Wrigley had agreed to sell the Cubs to the Tribune Company, the parent of the Chicago Tribune, in a deal that included Wrigley Field. The Times wrote that the sale ended a family association that began when Wrigley’s grandfather, the chewing-gum manufacturer William Wrigley Jr., became a minority shareholder in 1916, and that the grandfather acquired a majority interest in 1921. Wikipedia says his son P. K. Wrigley took over as majority owner in the early 1930s.

The Wrigley years shaped the look of the ballpark. Wikipedia says that during the 1937 renovation of the bleachers P. K. Wrigley discussed beautification with Bill Veeck, the son of the club’s president, who suggested planting ivy on the outfield walls. The vines were at first English ivy and were later changed to Boston ivy, and the Chicago City Council included the ivy in the ballpark’s landmark designation in 2004. The Department of the Interior’s 2020 release also dates the ivy-covered brick outfield wall, the bleachers behind it and the hand-operated scoreboard to the 1937 renovations.

The Tribune era ran from 1981 into the late 2000s. Wikipedia says the real-estate investor Sam Zell acquired the Tribune Company, and with it the Cubs, in December 2007, and concentrated on arranging a sale of the team. That sale went to the Ricketts family. Writing in the Chicago Tribune on 27 October 2009, Paul Sullivan reported that the family had officially taken control of the Cubs that morning, closing a deal for a controlling interest in the team and in Wrigley Field. The Ricketts family has controlled the Cubs since 2009, with Tom Ricketts as chairman.

The Ricketts era has also brought sponsorship onto the uniform. Wikipedia says that in 2024 the club added a uniform sponsor, Motorola Mobility, with the logo worn on a sleeve according to each player’s batting or throwing side, and that the walking cub logo moved to the other sleeve on both home and road shirts.

Design and documentation.

A baseball or basketball team carries its identity in a small number of places, and each one has its own rules. On a baseball cap the mark is usually reduced to a monogram or a single letter, sized to sit on a front panel and to read from the stands. On a jersey the same team may switch to a script wordmark, a looping hand-lettered name stitched across the chest, or to straight block lettering for numbers and player names on the back.

Basketball adds a large printed surface: the court. Centre-circle logos, painted keys, baseline wordmarks and the colour of the wood stain all become part of how a club looks on a broadcast. Arena signage, scoreboards and seat colours follow the same palette.

Mascots turn a logo into a costumed character for families and for merchandise, and they are often redesigned more freely than the crest itself. In recent seasons, city-edition uniforms and alternate sets have given clubs room to borrow local colours, neighbourhood names and period lettering without changing the primary mark. The guides in this series look at how each team handles those layers.

Signage and caps that changed colour slowly.

The red sign over the main gate carries the club’s name to the street corner. Writing for MLB.com on 7 April 2014, Cash Kruth reported that the marquee at Clark and Addison was commissioned from the Federated Sign Company of Chicago and installed in 1934, citing the Cubs historian Ed Hartig, and that its first purpose was advertising, promoting each day’s game to walk-up buyers. Kruth wrote that the marquee was at first fern green and read “Wrigley Field, Home of the Cubs”, with the cascading soft curved lines it still has; that it was painted dark blue a year or two after installation; that by 1939 “the” had been replaced with “Chicago”; that “Cubs” was swapped for “Bears” in autumns through 1970, while the football team played at the ballpark; and that it received its familiar coat of red paint in the mid-1960s, with an electronic message board added in the early 1980s.

The uniform moved through its own colour change. Wikipedia says navy blue, and sometimes red, served as the club’s colours until the mid-1940s, when it switched to royal blue and red. Early marks included a standing cub, a primitive version of the C-UBS logo and a “wishbone C” later taken up by the Chicago Bears. The white home uniform with blue pinstripes dates to 1957 and carries the circular Cubs logo on the left chest; a cub-head sleeve patch was added in 1962, given a red circle and a fiercer expression in 1979, softened again in 1994 and replaced in 1997 by the current walking cub. Wikipedia says the all-blue cap with a red “C” outlined in white, worn with the home, road and alternate road uniforms, was first worn in 1959, and that the grey road shirt, with “Chicago” in blue letters arranged in a radial arch, has been in use since 1997.

Special uniforms have borrowed from the ballpark and the city. Wikipedia says the club’s City Connect uniform, made in the Major League Baseball and Nike series that began in 2021, was navy with light-blue accents and carried a “Wrigleyville” wordmark inspired by the Wrigley Field marquee, with a cap “C” enclosing a red six-pointed star and a sleeve patch built around the Chicago city flag. It was replaced in 2025 by a powder-blue home alternate inspired by the city’s blues music, with lettering influenced by blues-era typography and a guitar-pick sleeve logo carrying the city name. Wikipedia also records the club’s white flag with a blue “W”, flown from the scoreboard after home wins; the colours were reversed from the original blue “W” flag by 1990.

For a design guide, the Chicago Cubs show how a nickname coined by a newspaper, a sign that went from green to blue to red, ivy planted in 1937 and a red C on a blue cap can work together as a set of cues alongside the logo. Compare it with MLB, the league whose batter silhouette sits on the same uniforms, and Boston Red Sox, another club whose ballpark wall is part of its identity. For this guide we use Cubs blue, marquee red and ivy green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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