The Winnipeg Jets Logo and Its Air Force Roots

A Hockey Crest That Looks Like a Military Badge

The Winnipeg Jets logo is less a hockey crest than an air force badge. When the NHL returned to Winnipeg in 2011, fifteen years after the original Jets left in 1996, the new team chose a fighter jet climbing over a red maple leaf inside a circle, a design that borrows openly from the roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force. It is clean, serious and very specific to its city, and it has become one of the better-liked marks in the league.

Where the Logo Came From

The relaunched franchise had a delicate brief. It needed to honor the original Jets, whose departure in 1996 still stung, while giving a new generation a team of its own. True North Sports & Entertainment, the club’s owners, worked with Reebok’s design team on a mark that could connect the two.

They found the connection in aviation. Winnipeg is home to one of the country’s key Royal Canadian Air Force bases, and the designers built the logo around that link: a stylized fighter jet angled upward over a maple leaf trimmed in red, set in a circular frame. The crest tells several stories at once, about national heritage, about a city that got its team back, and about hockey as part of local identity. It manages that with very few shapes, which is the hard part.

Blue, Silver and Red

The colors were chosen as carefully as the shapes. The deep blue suggests the open prairie and cold northern nights, and it carries the usual associations of loyalty and steadiness. Silver-grey picks up the sheen of an aircraft fuselage and gives the mark a cool, modern edge. The red, used sparingly, frames the design and brings in energy, as well as pointing straight at the maple leaf on Canada’s flag.

None of these choices is novel, and that is fine. The palette works because it uses familiar associations without fuss: blue for reliability, red for excitement, grey and silver for a technical feel. If you are choosing colors for your own brand, try palettes that people respond to without having to think. Viewers feel color before they consciously read it, and a palette that fits the brand earns trust quickly.

Shape and Meaning

The jet is drawn with clean geometric lines, angled so it reads as climbing, which gives the crest a sense of motion even when it is printed flat on a ticket. The maple leaf and circular frame make it equally at home on a jersey, a helmet or a phone screen. Careful use of negative space holds everything together and keeps the mark legible from arena signage down to a small social media avatar.

For fans, the jet works both literally and as a symbol. It is the team’s name, and it stands for speed, strength and ambition, all qualities a hockey club wants to be associated with. The broader lesson is to look for a symbol that means something specific to the people you are designing for. Winnipeg’s air force connection gave the team a story no other franchise could borrow, and the logo is better for it.

Designing Your Own Mark

The Jets logo also shows how well a simple design moves between physical and digital use. It looks as sharp on merchandise as it does on a high-resolution screen. That versatility is worth aiming for in any logo.

Modern logo makers, many of them now using AI, make it easy to try lots of ideas quickly. Start with the story, though, not the software. Sketch it on paper or on screen, decide what the colors should say and what the symbol should mean, and think about every place the logo will appear. Then use the tools to iterate and test variations, aiming for something as clear and adaptable as the Jets’ crest: simple, readable and not tied to this year’s trends.

For more on how famous brands have built and evolved their identities, read Branding 101: How To Build a Brand That Actually Sticks, or look at how one of the best-known marks in sport developed in Nike’s Iconic Logos: A Comprehensive History and Analysis.

Why It Works

The Winnipeg Jets crest succeeds because it started from something true about its city. A team that had to win back a hometown chose a symbol that already belonged to that hometown, drew it plainly and colored it with care. That is a better starting point than any trend, and it is available to almost anyone designing a logo: find the detail that is genuinely yours, and build the mark around it.