A college nickname, three cities and a long road back.

The Rams began in Ohio. English Wikipedia says the Cleveland Rams were founded on 11 April 1936 by the Ohio attorney Homer Marshman and the player-coach Damon Wetzel, a former Ohio State player. Wetzel, who served as general manager, chose the name because his favourite college team was the Fordham Rams of Fordham University, and Marshman, the principal owner, also liked it. The club played its first season in the short-lived American Football League of 1936 and joined the NFL on 12 February 1937.

The owner who shaped the club’s look arrived in 1941. Wikipedia says that in June 1941 the Rams were bought by Dan Reeves and Fred Levy Jr., and that Reeves later bought out his partners in 1962. In January 1946 Reeves won permission to move the team to Los Angeles, where it played at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum until 1980 and then at Anaheim Stadium in Orange County.

The team has moved twice since. Wikipedia says that after the 1994 season the Rams left Southern California for St. Louis, where they played as the St. Louis Rams from 1995 to 2015, and that on 12 January 2016 the league’s owners voted to allow the club to return to Los Angeles. The team played at the Coliseum again from 2016 and moved in 2020 to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, built on land owned by Stan Kroenke and shared with the Los Angeles Chargers.

The ownership has changed several times. Wikipedia lists Carroll Rosenbloom from 1972, his widow Georgia Frontiere from 1979, her children from 2008, and Stan Kroenke, previously a minority owner, whom the league’s owners approved as owner of the franchise on 25 August 2010.

A pen-and-ink sketch, a blue helmet and gold horns.

The Rams’ helmet horns began with a player who had studied art. The Los Angeles Times, in an article by Myrna Oliver on 14 February 2002, described Fred Gehrke, a Rams halfback and an art major at the University of Utah, as the man who painted horns on the team’s leather helmets. The paper quoted Gehrke’s own account, given to the Times in 1972: he made a pen-and-ink sketch of a ram’s horns in 1947 and showed it to the new coach, Bob Snyder, who told him to go home and paint it on a helmet.

Gehrke then took a brown leather helmet, painted it blue and drew the horns freehand in gold. The Times said the owner Dan Reeves approved the design on sight, that Snyder asked for 75 helmets, and that Gehrke painted roughly one a night over the summer in his garage in Inglewood, using a cardboard template that rarely fitted because the helmets varied in size. For the next two years he carried cans of blue and gold paint to touch up the helmets after each game, and by 1949 the Riddell company had baked the design into a plastic helmet. Gehrke told the paper the later horns were the same, except that the gold had become white because of television. Wikipedia dates the painted horns to the 1948 season.

The horn has stayed on the helmet in every city since, and it shapes the rest of the uniform. In 2020, the year the club moved into SoFi Stadium, Wikipedia says the Rams went through a rebranding of logos, colours and uniforms. NFL.com describes the resulting palette as royal, a gold tone called “Sol” and an off-white called “Bone”, which it says was meant to evoke a ram’s horn and the sand of Los Angeles beaches. The club refined that system six years later.

The refresh came in spring 2026. NFL.com reported on 16 April 2026 that the Rams had revealed updated uniforms. The jersey numbers moved from a sol-and-white gradient to a single colour, the pants adopted a two-stripe pattern with new white pants striped in sol and royal, and all three jerseys gained a full ram’s horn on the sleeve caps, a motif first used on the club’s 2025 Rivalries alternate. The primary logo became a monochrome mark with a sharper point on the horn, the wordmark became an italic “RAMS” with a horn sweeping from the end of the capital R, the ram’s head was sharpened, and the off-white “Bone” was replaced by a standard white.

Design and documentation.

A professional football identity is built from a small set of parts that have to work together at very different sizes. The helmet decal is a compressed version of the identity: a mark that sits on a curved shell, is seen from the side at a distance and has to read in a single colour against a painted surface. Many clubs keep the helmet mark separate from the primary logo used on print and screens, and the two are often redrawn on different schedules.

Colour names are part of the system. Clubs and their uniform suppliers give their tones proper names, and those names travel from style guides onto merchandise labels and broadcast graphics, which helps keep a shade consistent across fabric, paint and pixels.

Throwback uniforms let a club revisit an earlier set without retiring the current one, so an older wordmark, numeral style or helmet colour can return for a single season or a few games. Stadium naming adds another layer: when naming rights change, the building’s signage, tickets and wayfinding are rebranded while the team’s own marks stay the same.

A helmet design that outlived three moves.

The horn is the constant that has followed the team from city to city. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2002 that some viewers of an early coast-to-coast television broadcast of a game could tell the Rams from their opponents only by the horns on their helmets. The 2026 refresh brought the horn back to the sleeves, which NFL.com said returned the club to an element last worn full time in 1999 and recalled the first Los Angeles era from 1946 to 1994.

The supporting cast is newer. Wikipedia says Rampage, a ram character voted for by fans while the club was still in St. Louis, has been the official mascot since 2010. Fans have added their own versions of the mark: in the 1980s a supporter popularised wearing a hollowed watermelon with horns attached, and the “Mob Squad” name, taken from the word for a group of sheep, was used for the defence in 2015 and later by booster clubs.

The 2026 changes also reworked the secondary marks. NFL.com said the Rams removed the jersey patch bearing the nickname on the home shirts and the full club name on the road tops, and that the primary logo can now be trimmed in a secondary colour in certain applications. The white that replaced “Bone” first appeared on the club’s “Modern Throwback” uniform in 2021.

For a design guide, the Los Angeles Rams show how a single hand-drawn device can survive owners, cities and rebrands, and how a palette can be renamed and refined while the helmet stays put. Compare the city’s baseball club in our Los Angeles Dodgers brand guidelines, its basketball team in our Los Angeles Lakers brand guidelines and the league itself in our NFL brand guidelines. For this guide we use Rams royal, sol and horn gold with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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