Super Bowl VIII has been and gone in a whirlwind of sporting action, expensive ads and Taylor Swift. This means that we're on to the Super Bowl logo reveal for next year, and indeed the reveal of which teams will be playing on the pitch if you subscribe to the Super Bowl logo conspiracy theories.
The big novelty is that the 2025 Super Bowl logo is actually good, or at least interesting. That's because, for the first time, the NFL worked with a local artist on the design, and the collaboration involved an intriguing process (see our round up of Super Bowl design controversies to see where we're coming from).
The co-creator of the new Super Bowl logo is Tahj Williams, queen of the Black Masking Indian tribe in New Orleans, the host city for Super Bowl LIX. Her tribe has a a beading tradition that's passed down through the generations, and Tahj used this generations old craft to painstakingly create the Super Bowl LIX Logo bead by bead.
The Super Bowl logo is never going to please anyone, but I think this approach is a great move. The resulting design is as bright, bold and vibrant as New Orleans itself, perhaps even psychedelic. But beyond how this particular design looks, the approach of working with a local artist feels like the perfect solution to the complaints of boring logo designs in recent years, resulting in something that's much more meaningful and unique to each host city.
It was a controversial move when, for Super Bowl XLV in 2010, the NFL gave up the tradition of creating an entirely new logo each year in favour of drab standardised designs. Created with Landor Associates the move created a more consistent and recognisable brand identity for the Big Game but at the expense of personality
By Super Bowl LV, the designs had become boring. Since then, we've seen the return of at least a little originality to the logo design, with local references creeping in from the bloodbath, sorry, I mean Californian palm trees of Super Bowl LVI to the emblematic desert landscape and the reference to the Arizona State Flag in the design for Super Bowl LVII. The design for the 2025 Super Bowl feels like a logical continuation of that, treating the logo outline as a blank canvas to be filled by a local artist. I now hope they make this a new tradition.
But what teams will meet in Super Bowl LIX? Some people are still insisting on the great Super Bowl logo conspiracy theory despite that fact that neither team in Sunday's game had purple colours. The explanation? The 2024 Super Bowl was won by Taylor Swift. That means that based on the new logo design, people are variously predicting that next year's Super Bowl will be a clash between the Chiefs Vs either the Eagles, Seahawks or Green Bay Packers.
