Michael Doret Shaped Knicks Logo in 1991 for New York
Michael Doret designed the current knicks logo in 1991 after the NBA asked him to redesign the team’s nearly 30-year-old mark. The logo is still in use today, tying his hand-drawn work to one of the league’s most recognizable brands.
He said he did pretty much everything by hand, and created several versions before the league settled on the one with a triangle behind a basketball and “Knicks” in blockhead above it. Doret said the assignment meant more because it was for his hometown team.
Doret and the Knicks
Doret grew up near Coney Island and said he often went to Times Square as a child. “I would be staring at all the incredible banners, and sign paintings, all the painted rides and, the colors were just incredible, very bright,” he said, describing the visual style that shaped his work.
“It’s almost like a subconscious thing that I kind of follow,” he said of his design approach. The Knicks logo came out of that same instinct, built from the hand-lettered feel and bold color language he absorbed in New York.
Empire State Building Rejected
Some of Doret’s early concepts featured the Empire State Building, but the league rejected them. “But in the end, they, they nixed it. No pun intended,” he said. The final version kept the triangle and basketball, while the team later used another Doret design inspired by the old subway token as an alternative jersey logo.
The logo project also sits inside a wider career that included drawing and designing covers for KISS, doing art and graphics for several Disney movies, and having five Time magazine covers in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. But the Knicks mark remains the one still seen on the floor, on jerseys, and across the franchise three decades later.
New York Acceptance
“It’s very meaningful to me,” Doret said of the logo. “And it’s that acceptance by New York of me that, it just makes me very proud.”
For Knicks fans, the result is simple: the logo on the team today is the same one Doret built in 1991, after the NBA moved to replace a nearly 30-year-old design with something sharper, cleaner, and more rooted in New York’s visual identity.
