Danny Biasone’s Nationals and a name picked by the public.

The Philadelphia 76ers started life in upstate New York. English Wikipedia says Danny Biasone established the Syracuse Nationals of the National Basketball League in Syracuse, New York, in 1946, and that the team entered the NBA when that league merged with the Basketball Association of America in 1949. The Nationals played their last game on 26 March 1963.

Philadelphia had an empty slot at the time. Its own NBA team, the Warriors, had left for San Francisco in 1962. Wikipedia says investors Irv Kosloff and Ike Richman bought the Nationals from Biasone and moved them to Philadelphia, so the league returned to the city a year after the Warriors left. Sports Illustrated, in a piece by Khadrice Rollins dated 2 May 2018, confirmed the outline: the franchise was the Syracuse Nationals until it switched to the 76ers name on moving to Philadelphia for the 1963–64 season.

The new name came from the public. Citing the team’s own “History of the Name” page, Wikipedia says a contest was held and that “76ers,” nominated by Walter Stalberg, won, as a reference to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776. Sports Illustrated gave the same origin and added that the team’s traditional red, white and blue and the 13 stars arranged in a circle above the “7” in some versions of the logo were meant to drive the point home, echoing the early American flag.

The short form arrived almost at once. Wikipedia says “Sixers” was used in newspaper headlines from the start, that the club soon adopted it for marketing, and that across the decades “76ers” and “Sixers” have been officially interchangeable. In the early Philadelphia years the team played mostly at the Philadelphia Arena and the Civic Center-Convention Hall, with occasional games at the Palestra, before moving to the Spectrum.

From Comcast-Spectacor to the Harris group, and from one arena to the next.

Wikipedia says that on 13 July 2011 Comcast-Spectacor agreed to sell the 76ers to an investment group led by Josh Harris, a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, and the Harris group has controlled the team since 2011. Its holding company is Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. ESPN, carrying an Associated Press report on 13 January 2025, described the ownership group by that name, led by Harris, and reported that the team and Comcast had formed a 50-50 joint venture to build a new arena in the South Philadelphia sports complex, due to open in 2031, with Comcast also taking a minority stake in the team. The report said the 76ers then shared a Comcast-owned arena with the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, and that the deal replaced the team’s plan for a downtown arena.

The identity has swung between a patriotic base and one sharp detour. The original 1963 logo, Wikipedia says, was a stylised red “7” and blue “6” with 13 blue stars above the 7 for the original colonies. Early uniforms read “PHILA” across the chest, with the stars ringing the “76” on the shorts. A 1965–66 two-tone set with a thick red band across the middle lasted one season; a 1970–71 white uniform spelling out “Seventy Sixers” in red script lasted one more.

The 1970s brought a run of lettering experiments. Wikipedia lists an Art Deco “Sixers” for 1971–72, a block “Sixers” before 1976–77, and then a “Sixers” wordmark set in Bookman Old Style. In 1977 the logo gained a white basketball with blue outlines and the suffix “-ers,” completing the name. A 1991–92 set put “Sixers” in Helvetica above a blue wave of stars, with “Philadelphia” added above it.

Then came the break. For 1997–98, Wikipedia says, the team changed its logo and colours to appeal to a younger, hip-hop-oriented culture: red, white and blue were reduced to trim, and black, silver and gold became the core, with a gold “76ers,” a single silver star inside the 7 and a streaking basketball beneath. A red alternate brought “PHILA” back in 2006. The team announced a return to a modernised version of the 1977 logo in June 2009.

Design and documentation.

A basketball identity is built for a small, bright stage. The jersey carries much of the load: a wordmark across the chest, a number front and back, and trim at the neck and armholes, all of which have to read on a moving body under arena lights and on a television screen at the same time. Designers tend to favour bold, condensed letterforms, a short list of flat colours and outlines clean enough to survive tackle twill, sublimation and screen printing. Numerals are often drawn as a dedicated set so that similar digits stay distinct at a distance.

The court is the other canvas. A centre-circle logo, baseline wordmarks and painted keys turn the floor into a wide graphic seen from directly above, and the colours chosen there have to work with wood grain, glare and broadcast cameras. Alternate uniforms add a further layer: city-themed editions, throwback sets and statement colours let a club test new lettering or reference local history without changing its primary marks. Arena naming then adds a sponsor’s name to the building, so signage systems have to balance the club’s palette with a partner’s logo on scoreboards, concourses and entrances.

A tilted ball, a dribbling founding father and a bell.

The current look took shape in May 2015. Wikipedia, citing the team’s announcement, says the club unveiled a new version of the classic logo with a slight tilt to the white basketball, a roundel carrying the city name and six stars, and a secondary logo of a dribbling Benjamin Franklin. The uniforms that followed mixed earlier periods: “PHILA” on the home white and road blue sets as a nod to the late 1960s, “SIXERS” on the red alternate as a nod to the 1980s, side stripes with seven stars on one side and six on the other, and the inscription “PHILA TOUGH” sewn near the hem.

When Nike became the NBA’s supplier in 2017, Wikipedia says, the 76ers added a red drop shadow to the lettering and replaced “PHILA TOUGH” with “Brotherly Love.” City editions have kept returning to the 1776 theme and local landmarks: ornate “Phila” lettering drawn from the Declaration of Independence, a set inspired by the 1976 film Rocky with thirteen stars, a Liberty Bell silhouette on the belt, a Boathouse Row illustration, and lettering based on the neon signs of the Reading Terminal Market.

The mascot follows the same line. Wikipedia says the team’s 1980s mascot was Big Shot, later replaced by a rabbit called Hip Hop, who did not return after the 2011 lockout. Franklin the Dog was introduced on 10 February 2015 at The Franklin Institute. Sports Illustrated noted in 2018 that the club had leaned further into the origins of its name, naming the mascot after Benjamin Franklin, ringing a ceremonial Liberty Bell before home games, and basing its 2018 postseason logo on one of Franklin’s political cartoons about the colonies needing to unite.

For a design guide, the Philadelphia 76ers show how a name taken from a date can supply a whole visual system, from a ring of stars to a founding father on a basketball, and how a team that tried black and gold returned to the colours its name implied. Compare it with the NBA, the league whose uniform rules the 76ers’ kit follows, and the Boston Celtics, an Eastern Conference team covered in this series. For this guide we use liberty blue, colonial red and star white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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