The Detroit Lions are Super Bowl faves. I think the team's new uniforms helped. | Opinion
It's a smart piece of design, and it's got to instill confidence in the players who wear these uniforms. When you look good, you feel good. And when you feel good, you do good.
Ten years ago, the Detroit Lions were a muddy mess, and I don't mean their gameplay – I mean the team's uniforms.
Out on the turf, the Lions' storied Honolulu blue melded with the team's secondary color, a dull shade best described as "putty" or "cement" – too gray for a pleasing contrast and too blue for tone-on-tone harmony – into a swirling mass of blah that seemed to echo the team's lackluster performance.
The team has been revamped – as beautifully chronicled in a three-part series by my colleague Jeff Seidel – by a new owner, general manager and head coach who built a roster of insanely talented players into a (fingers crossed) Super Bowl-bound juggernaut.
You know what else the Lions have revamped? Honolulu blue.
A Lions media contact didn't respond to an email asking for an interview about the uniforms, yet the team all but admits the change on a page announcing the season's uniform lineup: "Behold a modern take on the most iconic Detroit Lions uniform ever worn. In refreshed 'Honolulu Blue,' the Home jersey welcomes back a classic white number font, and is paired with pants in true silver – the way it was meant to be."
Just look at the last 20 years of uniforms, compiled last year in a Detroit Free Press photo gallery, and the transformation is beyond obvious. Fifteen years ago, Honolulu blue was basically periwinkle, and no one, but no one, could win in periwinkle.
Now, Honolulu blue is rich, electric, leaping off the field.
And you cannot convince me that's not part of why the Lions are winning.
All season long, I've been riveted by the style and vibrancy of the Lions' new garb – OK, OK, I'm a relatively new football fan, and the games are awfully long – described enthusiastically by one Free Press letter-to-the-editor writer after last spring's reveal: "The blue is like the ocean, unstoppable, and the silver is like lightning, max voltage."
Gone is that muddy gray, relegated, in most versions of the team's newest uniforms, to helmet accents or other small details. They've introduced updated looks, like the all-black Motor City Muscle garb that the Minnesota Vikings surely have nightmares about.
The Lions are winners, and now they look like it.
"It does play to the psychology of it all, and it does affect a player," said Don Kilpatrick, chair of the illustration department at Detroit's College for Creative Studies. He's a guy who knows about the power of design, and he's a pretty serious Lions fan.
Updating the team's look has been a multiyear evolution, he said, with updates rolled out incrementally, so the Lions never stopped looking like the Lions, even when they started looking better.
But why did the old uniforms look so bad? And why do the new ones look so good?
In a word, science.
Definitely not periwinkle
To mix paint in the old Honolulu blue, Kilpatrick said he'd add a neutral color like brown to "gray it back," an art term for dulling the vibrancy of a hue.
"Most successful uniforms have moments of high contrast," Kilpatrick said, and with similar tones, that can be challenging. "Look back at the uniforms when Calvin Johnson was playing, or when Dan Campbell was playing as a Lion. When (gray was) combined with the dark jersey blue they had at the time, there wasn’t contrast happening at the right point. It wasn’t bad, but it could have popped more."
Yet color is relative, he said: "You can have a color that looks very muddy, but if you pair it with the right color scheme surrounding it, looks very vibrant" – for example, the juxtaposition of gray and white on the Lions' new all-blue uniforms, colloquially referred to as "the blueberries."
"If you look at (wide receiver) Amon-Ra St. Brown and the number 14, the bulk of the letter is in white, but they used the classic gray – which isn’t as dark as the '90s gray – for an outline," Kilpatrick explained. "So it really kind of glows, and it really pops, if you’re a viewer on TV or if you’re lucky enough to get a ticket. And it really celebrates the players out there."
The team's white away uniforms – "the marshmallows" – offer high contrast, Kilpatrick said: "Add a couple of accents and it really pops."
"It's knowing when to have color value steps together on the scale, or when to separate them," he said.
Think of the color wheels you might have used, if you've ever taken an art class, he said: "Sometimes, when you place colors together that are close in value, it messes with the cones in your eyes. It works really well to do complimentary schemes" – that's the colors opposite each other on the wheel – "but sometimes, it can backfire." ("Looking at old uniforms from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I would hate to suit up in that," Kilpatrick said.)
The new all-black uniforms are "very distinct," Kilpatrick said, noting that the team was wise to roll these new looks out over two seasons. "A gradual transition was the way to go. If they had just done the blackout uniform two years ago, it would have been jarring."
Have you noticed their helmets?
The Lions' updated design choices aren't limited to color, Kilpatrick said.
Take the team's helmets: "The proportions feel new, like 2025," he said, but are similar to the Barry Sanders era, when helmets also had three stripes. "But if you look at the proportion of the blue stripe compared to white stripes, it feels (more modern). They have a history here, and have a lot to pull from, but they're not doing it in a way that feels like they’re rehashing old stuff. They're keeping in mind where shape language and current tastes are going."
The new uniforms are also a slimmer cut, which isn't strictly about style. A slimmer sleeve, for example, "looks nice, but is also very practical," Kilpatrick said. "I think some players were getting injured because they were being tugged on by sleeve. ... It’s very pragmatic and hopefully lessens injuries and helps with not getting collar tackled."
Taken in total, team uniforms subtly connect the modern Lions to the team's past: "It really reflects the team," Kilpatrick said. "They're one of the few NFL teams that play as a team, for everyone from (owner) Sheila Hamp on down. The refresh harkens back to Barry Sanders and that great era, but it's distinctly them. ... It reminds you of watching Barry Sanders tear it up on the field then, but it's reflective of watching Jahmyr Gibbs tear it up on the field now."
It's a smart piece of design, and it's got to instill confidence in the players who wear these uniforms. When you look good, you feel good. And when you feel good, you do good.
It's just science.
Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, where this column originally appeared.