The Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League were founded in 1933. Over the course of the team's history, the team has had several logos while wearing virtually the same uniforms over the years, with subtle changes made to give the uniforms an updated look. The team colors, uniforms, and logo are often ranked as being among the best in the NFL.
Colors The Steelers have used black and gold as their colors since the club's inception, the lone exception being the 1943 season when they merged with the Philadelphia Eagles and formed the "Steagles"; the team's colors at that time were green and white as a result of wearing Eagles uniforms. Black and gold are the colors of the city's official flag which are the colors of the city's namesake Sir William Pitt. The colors black and gold are also representative of the two ingredients to create steel, coal and iron ore. Originally, the team wore gold colored helmets and black jerseys. Unique to Pittsburgh, the Steelers' black and gold colors are now shared by all major professional teams in the city, including the Pittsburgh Pirates in baseball and the Pittsburgh Penguins in ice hockey.
Logo
The Steelers have had several logos in the early part of their history, among them including the crest of Pittsburgh, a football with Pittsburgh's then-smoggy skyline, as well as a construction worker hanging onto a chain holding a pennant. Another logo showed the worker punting a football on a steel beam. It is rumored that mascot Steely McBeam was based on the latter logo.
Since 1963, the team has used a stencil typeface for its script logo. Since then, many team-related typefaces have used stencil font.
The team's current primary logo was introduced in November 1962 versus the Washington Redskins and is based on the flag originally designed by Pittsburgh's U.S. Steel and now owned by the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI). Ironically, it was Robert Sexton, an employee out of the Pittsburgh office of Cleveland-based Republic Steel, that suggested the Steelers adopt the industry logo. It consists of the word "Steel" surrounded by three (hypocycloids of four cusps). The original meanings behind the hypocycloids were, "Steel lightens your work, brightens your leisure, and widens your world." Later, the colors came to represent the ingredients used in the steel-making process: yellow for coal, orange for iron ore, and blue for scrap steel. While the formal Steelmark logo contains only the word "Steel," the team was given permission to add "ers" in 1963 after a petition against AISI.
While the logo still resembles the original Steelmark logo, the team has made subtle changes over the years in order to own a trademark on the logo, most notably making the three hypocycloids thicker in shape and changing the orange hypocyloid to red. The Steelmark logo itself has actually been heavily redesigned since then, using two variants, one of which uses a more modern design and uses three shades of blue for the hypocycloids while another one used concurrently has a strong resemblance to the recycling symbol. One alternate variation the team used in the 1980s—though rarely used today—combined the logo with the team's signature stencil-script typeface, replacing the regular "Steelers" typeface used with the team's longtime script logo.
Helmets The Steelers are the only NFL team that puts its logo on only one side of the helmet (the right side). Longtime field and equipment manager Jack Hart was instructed to do this by Art Rooney as a test to see how the logo appeared on the gold helmets; however, its popularity led the team to leave it that way permanently.Official site of the Pittsburgh Steelers - Logo History Since then, several college football teams such as Michigan State have followed the Steelers approach at one point or another and had their logo on only one side of the helmet. At the end of the 1962 season, they switched to black helmets for the 1962 Playoff Bowl to make it stand out more, and adopted the black helmets full time from the 1963 season onward. In 1977, the Steelers switched facemask colors from gray to black.
Another feature of the helmet is that a player's uniform number appears on both the front and back (the Steelers are one of only two teams in the NFL to do so, with the other team being the New York Giants). Just like the Giants, the Steelers have the two digit helmet numbers located to the left and right of the center stripe on both the front and back of the helmets. Also just like the Giants, the Steelers have the one digit helmet number located on the center stripe on both the front and back of the helmets. The numbers traditionally do not appear on the front of the helmet during the exhibition season, and also do not appear on the front of the throwback helmets.
The Steelers re-introduced gold helmets in 2007, paired with their 1962 throwback uniforms. The gold helmets featured the current Steelers logo rather than the original version of the Steelmark that was worn in 1962, and were also paired with black facemasks. These helmets continued to be used through the 2011 season. When the Steelers replaced the 1962 throwback with the 1933 horizontally-striped "bumblebee" throwbacks in 2012, the team retired the gold helmets.
Uniforms
Early years The Steelers have made only a few changes to their jerseys over the years. Originally, the team had vertically-striped jerseys that resembled prison uniforms at the time, with some variations having the city of Pittsburgh crest on the front, a la NHL uniforms. The team would later wear these uniforms as throwbacks in 1994. A horizontally-striped uniform with the uniform numbers placed on rectangular panels also appeared in the 1933 season; this design was worn as a throwback from 2012 until 2016.
The team adopted more standard NFL uniforms in 1936 and added Northwestern striping to the sleeves, and with the team finishing 0.500 for the first time in team history that season (at 6–6), the stripes have largely remained on the uniforms since. The striping pattern is named for Northwestern University, the college that is believed to have originated the pattern.
One exception that the stripes were omitted prior to the 1960s was from the aforementioned "Steagles" season because the team wore the Eagles uniforms as a cost-saving measure. The Eagles' jerseys at the time were green with white shoulders and no stripes. The Rooneys have acknowledged that because the combined team wore the Eagles uniforms that year, it is the only time in team history that the colors were something other than black & gold.
Two white jerseys Due to uniform experimentation in the 1960s, on two separate occasions the team's stripes were omitted. The first time came in 1962, when the Steelers began to wear two types of white jerseys, one of which featured a gold diamond on the sleeves in place of the stripes, with the "TV numbers" situated on the diamonds. These jerseys were primarily worn in home games when the team didn't wear their black jerseys, since the NFL at the time was encouraging teams to wear white jerseys so fans could see the team colors of their opponents.
The other jersey featured gold sleeves and a black version of the stripes, and were worn in road games when the home team elected to wear their colored jerseys. The team continued this way through the 1965 season.
Caped Crusaders
Perhaps the most infamous uniforms the team has ever worn came in 1966, when the team experimented with the "Batman"-themed uniforms, named as such because they were similar to the Batman outfits Adam West wore on the popular TV series. The jersey had no stripes on either the black or white jerseys and had a gold triangle-like diamond covering the shoulders.
Although they have been commonly called the "Batman" uniforms, Dan Rooney later made public his reasoning behind the uniforms. With his father still running the team and the Vince Lombardi-led Green Bay Packers being the class of the NFL, the younger Rooney (who still had a much smaller role with the team at the time) didn't want to follow the lead of other NFL teams trying to copy the Packers and wanted the Steelers to have a unique look. Coinciding with this was the development of the Golden Triangle in the city of Pittsburgh in the 1960s, so Rooney decided to give the uniforms a connection to the growing downtown district with the gold triangle-like diamond.
Although both Rooney and NFL Films's Steve Sabol liked the look (Sabol mentioned that you could easily tell when the Steelers played), the players didn't, adding that they looked like clowns or Batman, which is likely where the "Batman" rumors began. Due to primitive washing techniques at the time (as well as NFL teams frequently reusing the uniforms, unlike today where current supplier Nike gives teams new uniforms every game), the Steelers had trouble washing the uniforms because the gold triangle faded easily. Rooney was even asked on a radio show in Dallas when the team was playing the Cowboys on October 30, 1966 if the team was wearing the uniforms for Halloween.
The uniforms were retired after two seasons. The team has mentioned publicly as recently as 2007 that they will never wear them in a game again. However, in 2008, the team began to sell customized versions of the jerseys on their official Web site.
Fittingly, several Steelers players appear in the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises in a scene which was filmed in Heinz Field.
Modern classics After just two years with the "Batman" uniforms, the current uniform designs were introduced in 1968. The design was a modernized version of the pre-1966 black design and consists of gold pants and either black jerseys or white jerseys, except for the 1970 and 1971 seasons when the Steelers wore white pants with their white jerseys; the TV numbers were uniquely positioned between the sleeve and shoulder, at the apex of the shoulder. After a two-year hiatus, the Northwestern-style stripes returned for good, with the black jerseys getting white stripes in the two gaps of the gold stripes while the white jerseys got black outlines on the gold stripes, essentially making the stripe pattern the same on both jerseys. Both variations have been heavily used in team apparel.
Although the stripes initially went all the way around the sleeves, since the 2000 season they now stop in the middle of the jersey; this is due to football jerseys in general shortening the sleeves to reduce holding calls. As the sleeves continued to become shorter, and especially with the NFL's changeover to Nike as their league-wide uniform provider in the 2012 season, the full stripe pattern is no longer worn by most players, as the stripes are truncated at the bottom of the wide gold stripe. One exception to this trend is quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who, like a number of other starting quarterbacks, has continued to wear longer sleeves with the full striping pattern.
The helmet is solid black with a gold central stripe and small white player numbers on the forehead. Last names were added to the jerseys in 1970, as part of a new NFL mandate resulting from the AFL-NFL merger (the AFL teams had last names on the back of their jerseys). The names have always been gold with black trim on the white uniforms, except from 1970–71 when it didn't have black trim, and during the 1997 season when it was colored black. On the black uniforms, the player names were in gold without any additional trim. In 1997, the team switched to rounded numbers on the jersey to match the number font (Futura Condensed) on the helmets (though during the preseason and Week 1, player names remained in a block lettering), and a Steelers logo was added to the left side of the jersey; the TV numbers moved fully to the shoulder pad with these changes.