The Knicks logo that has carried New York’s basketball team for more than three decades was designed by Michael Doret in 1991, after the NBA called and asked him to redesign the club’s nearly 30-year-old mark. Doret said he accepted right away and made the whole thing by hand.
That is why the logo keeps coming up now: it is still the image tied to the Knicks today, and the designer behind it says it remains deeply personal to him. “It’s very meaningful to me,” Doret said, adding that the team’s acceptance of his work “just makes me very proud.”
The league had decided the old logo needed a refresh, and Doret, who lives in Los Angeles, was the person it reached. He grew up near Coney Island and spent time in Times Square as a boy, watching the city’s signage and color come alive around him. That early visual education, he said, never really left him.
Doret created several options for the NBA, including versions that featured the Empire State Building. The league rejected those ideas. He said he believes the building concept ran into rights issues, and the final choice went in another direction: a triangle behind a basketball with “Knicks” in block letters above it.
There was another idea that stayed in the family of Knicks branding even if it did not become the main badge. Doret said the team also used a logo he created, inspired by the old subway token, as an alternate jersey mark.
The work fits a long pattern in Doret’s career. He has done graphics tied to KISS covers and Disney movie art, and he said five Time magazine covers are in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. But the Knicks logo carries a different weight because it was adopted by a New York team and then kept in place for more than 30 years.
For Doret, that endurance is the point. A design asked for in 1991 is still in use now, and the man who drew it says the approval from New York is what lingers most.
