An arena looking for a tenant, and a city with a song.

The St. Louis Blues joined the National Hockey League in its 1967 expansion, one of six new clubs alongside the Minnesota North Stars, Los Angeles Kings, Philadelphia Flyers, Pittsburgh Penguins and California Seals. English Wikipedia says St. Louis was the last of the six to be admitted, and that the market was chosen over Baltimore at the urging of the Chicago Black Hawks’ owners, James D. Norris and Arthur Wirtz, who owned the old St. Louis Arena and wanted to sell it. St. Louis had not submitted a formal bid.

The city already had a hockey past. Wikipedia says the minor-league St. Louis Flyers began play in the arena in 1929, and that the Ottawa Senators moved there for the 1934–35 season as the St. Louis Eagles, a club that folded after one season. The Black Hawks later used the building for affiliates and for occasional NHL games in the 1950s.

The franchise went to a local group. Wikipedia says the first owners were the insurance executive Sid Salomon Jr., his son Sid Salomon III and Robert L. Wolfson, granted the franchise in 1966, and that the investment group behind the initial application also included the baseball player Stan Musial and his business partner. The Salomons renovated the arena before the first season.

The name came from music. Wikipedia says the club is named after “Saint Louis Blues,” the song by the composer W. C. Handy. The name joins a colour, a musical form and the city in two words, and it supplied the club with musical imagery for its marks. The song remains part of the game-night ritual. Wikipedia says the club’s organist plays a Glenn Miller arrangement of Handy’s tune in full before games and a short version at the end of every period.

Ownership changed hands several times over the following decades. Wikipedia says the pet-food company Ralston Purina bought the team and the arena from the Salomons on 27 July 1977 and renamed the building the Checkerdome, the name it carried from 1977 to 1983. The Walmart heirs Bill and Nancy Laurie bought the club in 1999. ESPN reported on 17 March 2011 that Dave Checketts had bought the Blues from the Lauries in March 2006 and that his SCP Worldwide and the private-equity firm TowerBrook Capital Partners had put the team and its arena up for sale. The same report named Tom Stillman, chairman and chief executive of the St. Louis beer distributor Summit Distributing, as a minority owner. Wikipedia lists the owner today as SLB Acquisition Holdings, with Stillman as chairman and governor.

A musical note, kept since the first season.

The crest has been a musical note from the beginning. Wikipedia says the Blues have worn blue and white jerseys with the “Blue Note” crest and gold accents since 1967. The musical note has stayed at the centre of every uniform set since, recoloured and redrawn rather than replaced. From 1967 to 1984, Wikipedia says, the jerseys used a lighter shade of blue with a contrasting shoulder yoke and stripes, and the blue jersey gained its yoke only in 1979.

The 1980s brought a darker turn. Wikipedia says the club redesigned its look in 1984, adding red, darkening the blue and dropping the shoulder yoke; the team name, at first set above the crest on the front, was removed in 1987. For 1994–95 the club went further, with red in a bigger role, thin diagonal stripes on the tail and sleeves, numbers tapering into those stripes, and a short-lived trumpet logo on the shoulders. Wikipedia says an Adidas version of that blue sweater returned in 2019 as a “90s Vintage Jersey.”

The navy era followed. Wikipedia says a new white alternate jersey appeared before the 1997–98 season, bringing back the shoulder yoke and the lighter blue and replacing red with navy as the accent; a matching blue jersey followed a year later and the earlier set was retired. The club’s own brand page says the navy Blue Note was introduced in 1997–98 and served as the team’s primary mark for the next 27 years.

The note has also been placed against the city’s skyline. Wikipedia says the club unveiled a navy third jersey on 21 September 2008 with a round logo showing the Gateway Arch with the Blue Note over it, “St. Louis” above and “Blues” below; it was worn from November 2008 and retired before the 2016–17 season. The arch returned in the alternate marks of 2025.

The mascot added a character. Wikipedia says Louie, a blue polar bear, was introduced on 10 October 2007 and named by a fan vote on the club’s website the following month; he wears a Blues jersey with his name and the number 00.

Design and documentation.

An expansion club starts its brand from nothing, so the identity tends to arrive as a sequence of public moments rather than as a single drawing. A name is chosen, sometimes after a fan vote or a shortlist, and announced at an event designed to be filmed and shared. The crest usually follows on the same day or soon after, presented alongside a primary colour set, a secondary mark, a wordmark and the first sweater designs.

Those pieces are meant to work together. The primary logo has to read on a helmet, at centre ice, on a ticket app icon and on a souvenir cap, which pushes designers towards bold silhouettes and a small number of flat colours. Secondary marks often borrow a local landmark, a regional story or a piece of wordplay, giving merchandise a second voice.

Colour names matter as much as the hues themselves. Clubs often give their tones descriptive names tied to place or theme, and those names travel into press releases, retail tags and broadcast graphics. The arena is the last layer: signage, concourse graphics, ice markings and naming-rights wordmarks all have to sit alongside the team’s own marks, so a building’s branding becomes part of how the club looks on screen.

Outdoor games test an old look, and the old look wins.

The route back to the original palette ran through outdoor hockey. Wikipedia says the Blues added a third jersey for 2018–19 based on the one worn at the 2017 Winter Classic, for Saturday home games, and unveiled a matching vintage white version for the 2022 Winter Classic. Two “Reverse Retro” uniforms followed: one in 2020–21 that recoloured the 1995–98 design on a red base, and one in 2022–23 on a gold base, based on prototype uniforms from 1966 that had the team name written around an early version of the note. For the 2025 Winter Classic, Wikipedia says, the club wore vintage white with light blue and gold stripes and a gold “ST. LOUIS” wordmark drawn from that same 1966 prototype.

The heritage look then became the main look. Christopher Detwiler reported on NHL.com, the league’s site, on 24 June 2025 that the Blues had unveiled updated home and away uniforms that modernised both the colour palette and the Blue Note. He wrote that the note now used two colours instead of three, with thicker blue and yellow keylines and a slight reshaping, and that the jerseys moved closer to the original palette first used in 1967. Chris Zimmerman, the club’s president and chief executive of business operations, told the site that the Winter Classic had been a proving ground that let the club reach back and bring a look forward. The club’s brand page describes the new mark as a remixed take on the Heritage Note, built to display more boldly in digital formats and to look cleaner on retail items.

Wikipedia says the 2025 redesign also added three alternate logos: a stylised fleur-de-lis combined with a musical note, an interlocking “STL” formed as a treble clef, and a trumpet featuring the Gateway Arch and water standing for the Mississippi River. The navy-trimmed home uniform of the previous era stayed in use as an alternate. The club has played since 1994 at the downtown arena now called Enterprise Center, which Wikipedia says was earlier known as the Kiel Center, the Savvis Center and the Scottrade Center.

For a design guide, the St. Louis Blues show how a single borrowed song can supply a name, a crest, a mascot’s jersey and a whole family of alternate marks, and how a club can spend decades on darker variations before returning to the colours it started with. Compare it with St. Louis Cardinals, the city’s baseball club, and Philadelphia Flyers, another club from the 1967 expansion. For this guide we use note blue, trumpet gold and riverfront navy with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep St. Louis Blues’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.