Redskins logos through the years
How Washington Redskins logos evolved from early portrait marks to the 1972–2020 profile, and what that history means for vector files, editing, and trademark use.
Contents
The essential answer
The subject is the Washington franchise’s retired Redskins identity: a run of Native American–themed logos used from the 1930s until 2020. The artwork most people mean is the burgundy-and-gold Native American profile that served as the primary logo and helmet mark from 1972 until the name and imagery were retired in 2020. Those marks are pictorial brand assets, not simple letterforms. A useful vector file has to rebuild the portrait as paths and fills. A picture of the logo, a wrapped bitmap, or an auto-trace is a different kind of asset. Downloading a file is also separate from permission to modify the art or use the trademarks, fonts, or likeness.
How the marks changed
The club began as the Boston Braves in 1932, became the Boston Redskins in 1933, and moved to Washington in 1937, keeping the Redskins name until 2020. The visual identity stayed on Native American portraiture for that entire span, while composition, line weight, and color treatment shifted. Public accounts treat 1972 as the start of the last primary logo. In 2020 the name and Native American marks were retired; the club then used a temporary Washington Football Team identity before adopting the Commanders name in 2022.
| Era | What the mark looked like |
| 1930s–early 1950s | Early Native American head drawings, carried from the Boston years into Washington |
| 1950s–1960s | Circular badges built around a Native American figure and feathered headdress |
| Late 1960s–1971 | Profile treatments that simplified the portrait and pointed toward the later helmet art |
| 1972–2020 | Burgundy-and-gold side profile of a Native American man with feathers; primary logo and helmet identity |
| 2020 | Name and Native American logos retired |
| 2020–2021 | Temporary Washington Football Team identity, with no Native American imagery |
| 2022 onward | Commanders identity |
Wordmarks, spear devices, and letter-R treatments appeared as secondary pieces beside the portrait. They are separate drawings. Substituting a mid-century circular badge for the 1972 profile, or tracing a helmet photograph that includes shine and stitching, will not match the flat brand mark from that era.
What the 1972–2020 profile is as artwork
The last Redskins primary logo is a full-color illustrated portrait: gold face, burgundy hair and headdress, and feather detail in burgundy, gold, and white. It is a pictorial mark, so vector delivery is more demanding than for a two-color wordmark or a geometric letter. A genuine vector version is a set of closed paths and solid fills, usually separated by color. Official production art would historically have been specified in the club’s burgundy and gold, with white as a knockout or a third fill. The face, hair, and feathers lock together; the file stays editable only if those regions are distinct objects rather than a flattened picture.
Vector files, rasters, and traces
Historical Redskins marks circulate as several different kinds of files. The distinction matters because a vector editor can open a file that still contains only pixels.
- Raster previews (PNG, JPEG, GIF) are pictures of the logo. Scaling them does not create vector paths.
- EPS, PDF, AI, or SVG wrappers can still hold an embedded bitmap of the portrait. Opening the wrapper does not make that portrait editable as paths.
- Auto-traces converted from a photo or a low-resolution PNG typically add extra nodes, broken overlaps in the feathers, muddy color breaks on the face, and paths that are hard to recolor or cut.
- Fan redraws may be clean path artwork. They are still independent recreations, not official masters, and they do not confer trademark rights.
A filename ending in .svg, .eps, or .ai does not prove that the portrait exists as editable vector paths. The test is to open the file and see whether the face and feathers are path objects or a placed image. Color count is a second check: a simple burgundy, gold, and white separation is consistent with brand construction; noisy extra hues are consistent with a trace of a photo or a compressed preview.
Rights, retirement, and practical use
Retirement of the Redskins name and Native American logos in 2020 did not place the artwork in the public domain. The NFL and the Washington club still control those trademarks. Permission to view or download a picture of a logo is separate from permission to modify the art, embed team lettering, manufacture goods, or use the marks in advertising. Editorial and historical reference sit in a different category from commercial reproduction. Rebuilding, recoloring, or shipping the profile as production artwork is a licensing question, not a file-format question. A fan-made vector does not answer it.
What public sources do not settle
Official vector masters of the retired identity are not published as free, editable brand kits. Public accounts agree on the long use of Native American portrait logos and on 1972–2020 as the life of the last primary profile. They do not document the internal layer structure, exact spot-color specifications, or every minor redraw of the official files. Those construction details cannot be inferred from a screenshot or from a file extension.