A borrowed nickname, then a bird, then a wheel.

Detroit joined the National Hockey League in 1926. English Wikipedia, drawing on Charles L. Coleman’s league history and a Detroit Free Press report of 16 May 1926, says NHL owners approved a franchise for a Detroit group on 15 May 1926, at a time when the Western Hockey League was folding. The new club bought the players of the WHL’s Victoria Cougars and took the Cougars name in honour of the departed team.

No Detroit arena was ready, so the Cougars spent their opening season across the river at the Border Cities Arena in Windsor, Ontario, before moving into the new Olympia in Detroit for 1927–28. In 1930 the club became the Detroit Falcons.

The present name arrived with a new owner. Wikipedia says the NHL allowed the grain merchant James E. Norris to buy the Falcons in 1932, and that renaming the team was his opening act once he took control in October. Writing for NHL.com on 22 November 2016, Cristina Ledra and Pat Pickens said Norris and the club’s manager, Jack Adams, agreed the franchise would be called the Red Wings, a name that echoed one of Norris’ former teams, the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association’s Winged Wheelers, and that also nodded to Detroit’s car industry.

Wikipedia fills in the background. Norris had earlier been a member of the Montreal AAA, a multi-sport club whose winged-wheel emblem came from its cycling roots, and he felt that a red version of that emblem suited a team playing in the “Motor City.” The Norris family held the club for five decades: Wikipedia says control passed within the family to Bruce Norris in 1955, and that he sold the team in 1982 to Mike Ilitch, the founder of the Little Caesars pizza chain.

The Red Wings stayed at the Olympia until December 1979, when they moved to Joe Louis Arena on the riverfront. In October 2017 they opened their tenancy of Little Caesars Arena.

One crest, two sweaters, very few alternates.

The Red Wings’ look has changed little over the decades. Wikipedia says the sweaters have been more or less the same since the 1930s: a white or red base with red or white piping. The significant changes it records are the replacement of the word “Detroit” with the winged wheel in 1932, and the arrival in 1983 of vertically arched lettering for player names, with block numbers. The team wears the arched names in the regular season and playoffs and uses straight, serifed nameplates in preseason.

Changes of outfitter left that design largely alone. When the league moved to Reebok’s Edge uniforms for 2007–08, Wikipedia says the club kept the design as close to the original as possible, with small changes to the red on the road sleeves and the placement of the captains’ letters. When adidas became outfitter from 2017–18, the Red Wings again kept the same basic look.

The club has worn history rather than novelty on special nights. For select games in 1991–92, the league’s 75th anniversary season, and for a commemorative game at Chicago Stadium on 27 January 1994, it wore sweaters based on the Cougars’ 1927–28 uniform: mainly white with five red horizontal stripes, the broad middle stripe carrying “Detroit” in bold letters. For the 2009 Winter Classic in Chicago it revived the Cougars’ 1926–27 design, white with a single red stripe across sleeves and chest and a white Old English D set in the chest stripe. A one-off sweater for the 2016 Stadium Series in Denver used a stylized red D, and the 2025 Stadium Series uniform used a red script “Detroit” with the winged wheel moved to the shoulder and “Hockeytown” on the leg.

For the centennial season the club unveiled a red and vintage-white uniform on 15 September 2025. The club says it nods to the Cougars and Falcons, brings back a lace-up collar, and is stitched in homage to the chain-stitched winged wheel it dates to 1932–48, with a jock tag reading “Established 1926 Detroit MI”.

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 cycling club’s emblem, recoloured for a car town.

The crest is a single image: a spoked wheel with a wing streaming behind it. Its source, as Ledra and Pickens and Wikipedia both describe, is the emblem of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, a club whose roots lay in cycling and whose hockey players were known as the Winged Wheelers. Norris turned the emblem red and attached it to a city known for building cars, and the wheel replaced the city’s name on the chest in the same year the team became the Red Wings.

The mark has occasionally been pulled into contexts the club did not choose. Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo Sports’ Puck Daddy reported on 12 August 2017 that versions of the winged wheel had appeared on signs and flags carried at the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and that the Red Wings publicly denounced the use of their logo the following morning.

Around the crest, the club has built a wider set of signals. The “Hockeytown” name appears in its marketing, its online store and, in 2025, on a Stadium Series uniform. Wikipedia describes the playoff tradition of fans throwing an octopus on the ice, and the giant octopus nicknamed Al, after the arena’s former head ice manager Al Sobotka, that hung at Joe Louis Arena during playoff runs.

Ownership has stayed in the Ilitch family since 1982. CNN’s Matt Rehbein reported on 11 February 2017 that Mike Ilitch, owner of the Red Wings and baseball’s Detroit Tigers, had died the previous day, and quoted his son Christopher Ilitch, president and chief executive of Ilitch Holdings, the family’s umbrella company, which Wikipedia lists as the team’s owner.

For a design guide, the Detroit Red Wings show how one borrowed emblem, recoloured and put on the chest in 1932, can carry a club through arena moves, outfitter changes and a century of sweaters with few changes to the crest itself. Compare it with NHL, the league that granted the Detroit franchise in 1926, and Toronto Maple Leafs, the opponent at the 2017 Centennial Classic. For this guide we use wheel red, garnet and rink white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Detroit Red Wings’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.