Paul Brown left Cleveland, chose Cincinnati, and reached back to the 1930s for a name.

The Cincinnati Bengals were built by a coach who had already put his name on one football club. English Wikipedia says Paul Brown, dismissed as head coach of the Cleveland Browns in January 1963, began planning a new franchise in 1965, looked at both Cincinnati and Columbus, and settled on Cincinnati after the city, Hamilton County and the Cincinnati Reds agreed to build a multipurpose stadium on the riverfront. Wikipedia says a group headed by Brown received franchise approval from the American Football League on 23 May 1967, and that the team began play in 1968. With the AFL and NFL already set to combine, the Bengals joined the NFL’s American Football Conference in 1970.

The name came from the city’s own football past. Writing in ESPN’s NFL Nation guide to the origins of every league team name, published on 2 February 2022, the Bengals reporter Ben Baby said Brown picked “Bengals” in homage to an earlier professional team that went by the same name, citing the club’s media guide, and that fans had suggested other names, among them “Buckeyes”, which was rejected because of its use at Ohio State. Wikipedia says earlier Cincinnati Bengals teams had played in three previous leagues called the American Football League between 1937 and 1942, and quotes Brown as saying he chose the name “to give it a link with past professional football in Cincinnati”. Wikipedia also notes that the Cincinnati Zoo was home to a rare white Bengal tiger at the time.

The colours came from Cleveland. Wikipedia says Brown chose the exact shade of orange used by his former team and added black as the secondary colour, and that his logo was as plain as it gets: the word “BENGALS” in black lettering. Brown still owned much of the equipment he had used in Cleveland, Wikipedia says, and the first Cincinnati uniforms were modelled on the Browns’ own. An Ironton Tribune report of 23 April 2004 put it the same way: when the Bengals first took the field in 1968 they wore uniforms similar to the Browns’, and the main difference was the word “Bengals” stencilled on the sides of the orange helmet. Wikipedia describes those letters as black block capitals with a white outline, on a helmet with no stripe.

The first home was borrowed too. Wikipedia says the Bengals played their first two seasons at the University of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium before moving in 1970 to Riverfront Stadium, which they shared with the Reds until 2000, when they opened Paul Brown Stadium, the ground now known as Paycor Stadium. Brown coached the team himself from its first season through 1975.

From father to son, with the Brown family in charge throughout.

The Bengals have never left the family that founded them. Wikipedia says controlling interest passed in 1991 to Paul Brown’s son, Mike Brown, to whom his father had already handed control of the club. In 2011, Wikipedia says, Mike Brown bought the shares held by the estate of the co-founder Austin Knowlton, making him majority owner. Wikipedia names Katie Blackburn as the club’s executive vice president, and says that Elizabeth Blackburn, the team’s head of strategy and fan engagement, wrote an editorial for the Bengals website about her work on the team’s image, in which she made clear the old fight song was staying.

The club has kept a few homespun traditions from its first season. Wikipedia says the fight song, “The Bengal Growl”, was written in 1968 by the team’s entertainment director George “Red” Bird, a friend of Brown’s since their days at Massillon Washington High School in Ohio, where Bird had led the Massillon Tiger Swing Band; Bird had run music and entertainment for the Browns before Brown brought him to Cincinnati. Brown asked him for a song in the spirit of the Browns’ own fight song.

The team’s chant came from the stands. Wikipedia says the “Who Dey” chant, in full “Who dey, who dey, who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?” with the answer “Nobody”, has been heard since the 1980s, and that its origins are linked in local lore to beer vendors at Riverfront Stadium calling out the Hudepohl brewery’s Hudy beer, while another theory points to a 1980 car-dealer commercial. The chant gave its name to the club’s official mascot: Wikipedia says Who Dey is a Bengal tiger who wears the number 1, and that the cheerleading squad is called the Ben-Gals.

The founder remains part of the club’s presentation. Wikipedia says the Bengals began a Ring of Honor in 2021 whose inaugural class included Brown himself. Wikipedia notes that in 2025 the team and Hamilton County were negotiating the stadium lease, with Katie Blackburn saying she liked its downtown location.

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.

Plain orange through the 1970s, then a tiger’s coat painted straight onto the shell.

The stripes nearly came first. Wikipedia says that among the helmet designs Brown rejected in the 1960s was a striped motif much like the one the team adopted later, though its stripes were more uniform in width. Instead the plain orange helmet with the “Bengals” lettering stayed through the 1970s. Wikipedia says the team added sleeve numbers to its jerseys in 1980, the same year the facemask changed from grey to black.

The break came in 1981. The Ironton Tribune called it a radical change made before that season, when the team switched to striped helmets and trousers, and said players joked at the time that they would have to play well so nobody would poke fun at the new look. Wikipedia says the club kept black jerseys, white jerseys and white trousers but trimmed them with orange and black tiger stripes, and introduced the orange helmet with black tiger stripes that has stayed in use ever since; it adds that Sports Illustrated likened the new helmets to “varicose pumpkins”. In 1997, Wikipedia says, a leaping tiger logo went on the sleeves, alongside an alternate logo of a Bengal’s head facing left.

Later redesigns worked around the helmet rather than on it. The Ironton Tribune reported on 23 April 2004 that the striped helmets were staying while the Bengals made other sartorial changes, unveiled to premium seat holders at Paul Brown Stadium, with black, white and orange jerseys and black and white trousers; the head coach Marvin Lewis said the new uniforms gave a feel of “energy, movement and speed”. Wikipedia says that set added a new stripe pattern and a logo of an orange “B” covered in black tiger stripes. The next set was announced in January 2021 for that season: Wikipedia says it kept the striped helmet, dropped the side and shoulder panels, used a new sleeve stripe, put the team wordmark on the chest, removed the sleeve numbers and changed the shade of orange. In 2022 the club added a white alternate helmet with black stripes, and in 2024 orange trousers and an all-orange combination.

For a design guide, the Cincinnati Bengals show how a club can turn a borrowed colour into a mark of its own by painting a pattern rather than a picture onto the helmet, and how a plain stencilled name can give way to stripes that later redesigns leave alone. Compare it with Cleveland Browns, the club whose orange Paul Brown brought with him, and Cincinnati Reds, the Bengals’ former stadium partners. For this guide we use Bengal orange, black and white with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cincinnati Bengals’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.