Chicago Bulls Logos Over the Years: Comparing Design Changes

What the Chicago Bulls logo is

The Chicago Bulls core identity is a compact pictorial mark: a red charging bull with black horns, facing the viewer’s left, mouth open in a snarl. The franchise introduced that concept with the club’s 1966 founding and has kept the same subject, pose, facing direction and color roles since. Later versions are refinements of drawing quality, edge control and facial detail rather than a replacement identity. For anyone comparing logo versions or preparing vector assets, the useful split is between that stable primary bull, the separate “BULLS” wordmark, and later alternate or special-edition lockups that crop, outline or recolor the same animal.

Observable features of the primary mark

The primary mark is a head-dominant charge, not a full-body animal in stride. The composition sits in a roughly circular bounding box: horns, skull, muzzle and a simplified neck-and-shoulder mass. Legs are not part of the usual reading. Three color roles do the work. Red fills the body and outer ear. Black carries the horns, inner ear, nostrils, mouth interior and the dark structure of the eye. White appears in the teeth and the eye, and as the field around the mark. The near horn is a large black crescent; the far horn is smaller and sits behind the head. The mouth shows a row of white teeth against a black interior. A single eye, white with a dark pupil, sits under the brow. There is no lettering inside the pictorial.

• Subject and pose: a bull in a coiled charge, head lowered, facing left.
• Crop: head, horns and shoulder mass; a tight, almost circular silhouette.
• Color roles: red body, black structural and facial marks, white in eye and teeth.
• Type: none in the primary pictorial; the wordmark is a separate drawing.
• Detail that fails first at small size: teeth, eye and inner-ear shapes.
• Detail that must survive reduction: horn crescent and outer head-and-shoulder outline.

How the identity developed

The charging-bull mark belongs to the team’s first season, 1966–67. Secondary design and sports-branding accounts widely credit Dean Wessel as the original artist. This article does not have a franchise archive, contract or designer primary record in hand, so that credit is reported as a common attribution, not independently confirmed here.

Public timelines treat 1966 as the introduction of the concept and describe later reproductions as cleanup: smoother outlines, more consistent horn curves, tighter teeth and eye shapes, and more even red fills as printing and, later, vector production replaced hand-inked art. Exact years for those refinements are not consistent across secondary accounts and are not verified here from official archives. What is stable across those accounts is the strategy: the club did not change the animal, the snarl, the left-facing pose or the red-black-white roles. That continuity is the main historical fact a designer needs. A “new” Bulls logo in later decades is usually a better tracing of the same mark, a different crop, or a special-edition lockup, not a new mascot.

Commentators often tie the bull to Chicago’s historic stockyards and to an idea of force. Those readings are editorial. Without a stated motivation from the franchise or the credited designer in the records used for this article, they should not be treated as official design intent. The documented design facts are the pose, the crop, the three-color split and the decision to keep them.

Wordmarks and later treatments

Beside the pictorial sits a wordmark: the word BULLS in heavy, slightly condensed athletic lettering, often with a forward lean, typically in red with a black outline or drop and sometimes a white counter or trim. It is a separate drawing. Combining bull and type produces a lockup, meaning a fixed arrangement of mark plus letters that should be spaced as one unit. Alternate and special-edition treatments reuse the same bull as a head crop, a circular badge, an outline, a one-color knockout, or a commemorative pairing. City, statement and anniversary applications change the surrounding geometry and sometimes the colorway; they do not, in the versions this comparison can describe, invent a different animal. Those treatments are application-specific. They are not substitutes for the primary charging bull unless a brief names them.

What separates the versions

The comparison that matters is not a sequence of unrelated logos. It is one pictorial concept held nearly still, plus type and occasional alternates. Shared criteria below are visual and production-oriented: geometry, color, type, crop and how editable a version is likely to be. Fine-grained claims about horn angle, tooth count or millimetre shifts between early and later drawings would require matched specimens under the same viewing conditions. Those specimens were not compared here, so the table stays at the level of construction and use.

Criterion	Early charging bull (1966 concept)	Later / current primary pictorial	Wordmark and alternates
Subject	Left-facing red bull, black horns, open mouth	Same subject, pose and facing	Same bull cropped or badged, or the word BULLS alone
Geometry	Hand-inked charge in a compact, round-ish mass	Tighter outlines and more even curves in reproduction; still a circular-leaning silhouette	Wordmark is a horizontal line of type; badges add a ring, frame or different crop
Color	Red body, black horns and face, white in eye and teeth	Same three roles; fills usually cleaner in later masters	Often the same red-black-white; special editions may shift colorway
Typography	None in the pictorial	None in the pictorial	Custom athletic BULLS lettering; lockups add spacing rules between bull and type
Scalability (untested here)	Large shapes should hold; facial interior is the risk	Same structure; cleanup usually helps small reproduction, but that is untested at specific sizes in this article	Wordmark reduces until counters close; circular badges add a minimum diameter
Editability	Older scans are often raster or rough traces	A true vector master should be few large fills plus black facial shapes	Lockups and badges are more parts and more alignment constraints
Typical use	Throwback, heritage and first-season reference	Default identity for contemporary applications	Jerseys, type-only layouts, circular avatars, special editions

Geometry, color and vector implications

Geometrically the primary bull is a silhouette problem first and a face problem second. The outer path—horn crescent, forehead, muzzle, chin and the curve of the shoulder—has to close as one readable mass. Interior black shapes (mouth, nostrils, inner ear, eye socket) sit on top of the red fill; they are not a second animal. That stacking is why a careless trace often looks “off”: horns detach from the skull, the mouth floats, or the far horn reads as a stray crescent. A usable vector file is a small set of closed shapes with a clear stacking order, not a swarm of overlapping strokes that happen to look correct at one size.

Color is a three-role system, not a full palette of tints. Red is the body. Black is structure. White is highlight and field. Official spot, process and screen formulas (Pantone, CMYK, RGB or hex) are not verified from current brand guidelines in this article, so numeric recipes are omitted. In production terms, the mark is built for spot-color thinking: one red, one black, paper white. One-color versions should preserve the horn-and-head silhouette first; dropping the interior face is safer than thinning the outer path. Do not infer that a file is “the” official geometry because it is labelled SVG, EPS or AI. A filename and extension say nothing about path construction, overprint, or legal right to use the mark.

Scalability is inferred from construction, not from a size test in this article. Large red masses and high-contrast black horns usually hold at small sizes; teeth, eye and inner ear are the first details to clog or disappear. If an application needs a favicon, embroidery or a one-color stamp, specify whether the interior face is required. That choice is a use decision, not a claim that one historical year “prints better” without a press or screen test.

Choosing a version for the job

Recommendation depends on the application. For contemporary identity, digital UI, current merch and anything that should look like the club now, use the current primary pictorial, from an authorized master if the use is official. For a vintage season, heritage night or throwback uniform, use the early drawing only when that season’s art is specified; do not mix an early face with a current wordmark unless the brief asks for a hybrid. Use the BULLS wordmark when type, not the mascot, is the required element. Use a circular badge or head crop when the layout is an avatar, a ball, or another round field. Special colorways belong to the edition that issued them.

• Need the club’s default look: current primary charging bull.
• Need 1960s heritage: the early drawing of the same concept, if a documented throwback asset exists for that brief.
• Need letters on a jersey or a type-forward lockup: the BULLS wordmark, spaced as specified for that lockup.
• Need a round or tiny crop: a head-crop or badge built from the same silhouette, with a decision on whether teeth and eye remain.
• Need a file to edit: obtain or commission a real vector master; a fan trace or a raster save is a drawing, not a production file.
• Need permission: availability of an image is not a licence. Team and league marks are restricted.

Gaps this comparison cannot close

Several points that readers often want settled are not established by attributable records in this article. They are listed so they are not filled in with inference.

• Designer credit: Dean Wessel is widely named in secondary accounts; not confirmed here from a primary franchise or designer record.
• Exact years of drawing refinements: secondary timelines disagree; not verified from official archives here.
• Official design rationale and symbolism: not in hand; stockyard and “toughness” readings are editorial.
• Numeric color specs: not taken from current brand guidelines here.
• Small-size, print and embroidery performance: untested in this article.
• Path count, point placement and overprint: cannot be read from a public image or from a file extension.
• Reuse rights: a downloadable logo is not permission to reproduce it.