The New Orleans Pelicans Logo History
The franchise has gone through two distinct visual identities since arriving in New Orleans, and it's worth actually looking at both if you're tracking the evolution. The original 2002 design carried a lot of baggage from the Charlotte Hornets era. What came next was a cleaner attempt to ground the team in local culture, though even that one got tweaked over time. When the Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, they kept the old Charlotte colors and bird silhouette essentially intact. The primary logo was a hornet with orange and purple, just relocated. It wasn't a redesign — it was a copy-paste with a city name change. That lasted until 2013, which is a long time to not have a distinct identity for a new market. The 2013 rebrand introduced the pelican. This was when the team actually committed to something new. The primary logo became a black heron mid-flight with "PELICANS" arched above it in teal, black, and gold. The bird was more detailed than typical sports logos at the time — individual feather segments were visible, wings spread wide. It was designed by Lance Haffner at Logo Design Live. Some people hated it. Some people grew to like it. Both reactions are fair.
The alternate "zebra stripe" pelican came around 2015-2016 as a second look. This version used the same silhouette but filled it with horizontal zebra-like stripes instead of solid color. It was meant to feel more dynamic, more aggressive. It stayed on and off across jerseys for a few seasons before settling into a supporting role. Then in 2024, the team simplified again. They dropped the winged wordmark for a cleaner, more modern iteration. The pelican became more stylized, less detailed, aligned with the general direction every league logo has been heading — flatter, bolder, works at small sizes on social media thumbnails. The colors stayed the same: teal (#006BB6), black (#000000), gold (#FCD116), and white (#FFFFFF). I've worked with this logo across multiple formats — print, embroidery, digital banners, stadium signage — and the main thing you need to know is that the feather detailing on the older versions becomes a mess when reproduced at anything under 3 inches wide. The zebra-stripe alternate has the same problem. If you're getting these embroidered on caps or polos, you need to simplify. I've had clients send me the high-res PNG and expect it to work at 2 inches. It doesn't. The workaround is always the same: use the simplified 2024 version for anything small, and keep the detailed primary only for large-format applications where resolution holds up.
The secondary mark — the "PN" monogram with the pelican wing incorporated — has seen more variation than the primary. It appeared on the 2018 City Edition uniforms and popped up on warm-up gear more than anything else. It's not an official primary alternate but it shows up enough that people assume it is. If you're looking for official high-resolution files, the team's media site at nba.com/pelicans/media has the brand guidelines. Third-party sites will have PNGs, but the color values won't be exact. For anything that needs to be production-ready — uniforms, retail merch, broadcast graphics — stick with the league's official assets or the team's brand portal directly. I once spent three hours correcting teal values on a batch of promotional posters because someone grabbed a compressed JPEG from a fan site. The difference between screen teal and the actual brand teal (#006BB6) is noticeable once it's printed, and you can't fix it after the fact.
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