A jazz standard, a feast day and an archbishop’s blessing.

The New Orleans Saints were named before they had a single player. English Wikipedia says the local sports entrepreneur Dave Dixon and a civic group had spent more than five years trying to bring an NFL franchise to the city, and that the commissioner Pete Rozelle announced on 1 November 1966 that the league had awarded New Orleans an expansion team. Wikipedia says the deal had been reached about a week earlier, and that Dixon suggested holding the announcement until 1 November so that it would fall on All Saints’ Day. The club began play in 1967.

The name has more than one root. In ESPN’s NFL Nation guide to the origins of every league team name, published on 2 February 2022, the Saints reporter Mike Triplett wrote that the nickname was inspired by the hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In”, recorded by the New Orleans native Louis Armstrong, and that it stands for the city’s jazz heritage. It was also, he wrote, a fitting nod to the franchise being awarded on All Saints’ Day. Triplett added that the team’s first owner, John Mecom Jr., made sure the name had the blessing of the archbishop in a traditionally Catholic city. Wikipedia names that archbishop as Philip M. Hannan and credits Dixon with clearing the name with him.

The colours came from the oil business. Wikipedia describes Mecom as a young oilman from Houston who became the team’s first majority stockholder, and says the jazz trumpeter Al Hirt was a part owner. Mecom’s first choice, Wikipedia says, was “Mecom blue”, a medium shade used across his other investments, but the league office told him the combination was too close to that of the San Diego Chargers. He settled on black as the primary colour instead, a nod to his involvement in petroleum, since “black gold” is a byword for oil, with old gold and white alongside it.

Wikipedia notes that the Pittsburgh Steelers had long used black and gold too, but that their gold sits closer to yellow, which kept the two schemes distinct on the field.

Mecom to Tom Benson to Gayle Benson, and Tulane Stadium to the Superdome.

The first home was a college ground. Wikipedia says the Saints played their first eight seasons at Tulane Stadium and moved in 1975 to the Louisiana Superdome, now named the Caesars Superdome, where they have played ever since. While at Tulane Stadium, Wikipedia says, the club mostly wore white at home, leaving visitors in their darker jerseys in the subtropical heat.

Wikipedia dates the Mecom era from 1967 to 1984, and says Tom Benson, an automobile dealer and banker, acquired the franchise in 1985. The Ringer, reporting on 15 March 2018, said Benson had owned the Saints since 1985, that he had died that day, and that ownership of the Saints and of the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans would pass to his wife, Gayle Benson. The Ringer reported that the Saints’ own account answered questions about the succession by stating that Gayle Benson was the owner. She has owned the Saints since 2018, and Wikipedia says she succeeded her husband at both clubs.

The cheer squad has been renamed too. Wikipedia says a cheerleading squad has existed since the franchise’s founding, that it was called the Saintsations from 1987 to 2021, and that the current name, the Saints Cheer Krewe, was adopted in 2021.

The fleur-de-lis has also carried meaning off the field. Wikipedia says that in 2006, to honour the team’s return to Louisiana, the Saints wore a patch showing an outline of the state with a fleur-de-lis set over it, close to a logo the club had used in the 1980s.

Design and documentation.

A professional football club’s visual identity has to work at very different scales: a mark painted on the side of a helmet, a wordmark stitched across a jersey, a logo printed on a ticket, and signage that spans a stadium façade. Helmet logos in particular are designed to read from a distance and from several angles, so they tend to rely on a single bold silhouette, a limited set of colours and clear outlines that separate the mark from the shell beneath it.

When a club relocates or changes its name, designers face a choice between continuity and a clean break. Some identities carry an existing symbol to a new city and change only the place name in the wordmark; others introduce a new name, a new animal or figure, and a new palette while keeping a link to local history or geography. Regional names, which describe a state or an area rather than one city, are often chosen to widen the audience a team speaks to.

Uniform refreshes usually follow a slower rhythm. Clubs adjust outlines, update typefaces for numbers and names, introduce alternate or throwback jerseys, and refine colour values, often in partnership with the league’s uniform supplier. The guides in this round look at how those decisions show up in each club’s logo, colours and lettering.

Gold helmets since 1967, a Louisiana outline, and black helmets at last.

Few parts of the Saints’ look have changed. Wikipedia says that, except for minor modifications, the logo and uniforms have basically stayed the same since the club’s 1967 debut. The emblem is a fleur-de-lis, which Wikipedia describes as a symbol of the city of New Orleans and of the French royal family, including the House of Bourbon. The uniform pairs gold helmets and gold trousers with black or white jerseys, and the changes over the decades have mostly been to stripes and trim.

The helmet is the clearest example. Wikipedia says the team wore black helmets during the 1969 preseason, but that Rozelle barred them from the regular season because Mecom had not told the league office about the change. Black helmets did not return until 2022, after the league dropped its one-helmet rule, as an alternate carrying a gold fleur-de-lis on each side and a triangle pattern of tiny gold fleurs-de-lis. In 2025, Wikipedia says, the club added a white helmet with a gold facemask, a thick gold centre stripe with fleur-de-lis silhouettes and two thin black stripes, and moved the black helmet to a new “Gameday Gold” alternate uniform.

The trousers and trim have moved more. Wikipedia says the Saints switched to white trousers in 1975 with the move to the Superdome and added black trousers the next year, a change linked to the coach Hank Stram. From 1986 to 1995 the sleeves and trouser sides carried a fleur-de-lis inside an outline of Louisiana, with a star marking New Orleans, in place of the stripes worn since the start; in 1996 a plain fleur-de-lis replaced it. Gold numbers on the white jersey proved hard to read, and Wikipedia says they turned black in 1999. A 1967-style throwback, with a larger fleur-de-lis and a darker gold, appeared in 2002 and has returned in several later seasons.

For a design guide, the New Orleans Saints show how a city emblem can serve as a team mark almost untouched for decades, with colour and trim doing the updating. Compare it with Atlanta Falcons, the division rival founded a year earlier, and NFL. For this guide we use old gold, black and white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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