Hi Kerry,
We ought to have an FAQ about sports jerseys of professional teams, but what it would say is that the lettering and logos for professional sports teams are almost always custom font designs. The teams and leagues do this for the reason that it makes it hard for anyone to imitate their products — and it’s all about marketing.

There are font designers like Dennis Ortiz-Lopez who specialize in designing fonts for sports franchises.

Sorry.

Hi Mike
Thanks very much for your time. It looks like I will literally be “back to the drawing board”

Thanks again
Kerry

Mike, I think your statement might be a bit broad — the logo for the major league baseball team here in Phoenix (the woeful Arizona Diamondbacks) uses a barely modified setting of Emigre’s Matrix.



Or perhaps this is the exception that proves the rule.

Go Vikes!

(Granted, this logo was spawned in the ’60s)

I think the face for the Rockies is called NHL Lockout

Mike, I think your statement might be a bit broad — the logo for the major league baseball team here in Phoenix (the woeful Arizona Diamondbacks) uses a barely modified setting of Emigre’s Matrix.


Marc, There is also the chance that with a serif font like that, especially using all caps, that it might be hard not to look like some serif font. Is the high-centered M the ‘Matrix’ earmark that makes your case? It seems like a name as long as DIAMONDBACKS would dictate as narrow an M as possible, and that style would fill the bill. Matrix isn’t the only serif font with that kind of M, — Red Rooster Kingsrow is another, for example — but my point is still that most team lettering and logos, particularly newer teams, try to be distinctive so that they are more marketable, and harder to imitate. The Vikings (Futura Black) is an exception, and as noted has been around a long time. If we were to make lists of the pro teams, I doubt many would use commercial fonts, but I’m not ready to take on that task.