"It's very meaningful to me," Michael Doret said, describing the mark he designed in 1991 that the New York Knicks still use today. Doret, now based in Los Angeles, says the NBA called him that year and asked him to redesign a logo that had gone nearly 30 years without an update; he accepted the job instantly and got to work almost entirely by hand.
The choice the league made is precise: a triangle behind a basketball with "Knicks" in blockhead type above it. That triangle-and-ball combination became the team's primary symbol after Doret sent in several designs, and it has remained the visible face of the franchise ever since, a rare continuity in a sport that often swaps marks and color treatments.
Doret offered a clear portrait of his process. He said he "did pretty much everything by hand," sketching and refining multiple concepts before mailing them to the NBA. Among the options were versions that featured the Empire State Building—images tied directly to New York's skyline and to Doret's own memories of the city—but those were rejected in the selection process.
On the decision to drop the skyscraper motifs, Doret was candid: "But in the end, they, they nixed it. No pun intended," he said, adding that he believes the Empire State Building ideas were turned down because of rights issues. That friction—between a designer's impulse to anchor a team mark in the city's most iconic silhouette and the legal constraints around using such imagery—explains why the chosen logo is more abstract and emblematic than literal.
There are visual traces of Doret's upbringing threaded through the work. He grew up near Coney Island and said he frequently visited Times Square; the bright colors and painted signage of those places informed how he thought about type, contrast and overall energy. "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 recalled, describing the instincts he brought to the brief.
The producer-like closeness Doret kept to the project extended beyond the main mark. He also designed an alternative jersey logo inspired by the old subway token, a small emblem that the team later used on uniforms. That secondary mark shows how Doret’s hand—his interest in New York ephemera and in graphic history—helped shape not only the primary identity but also the visual crumbs fans find on sweaters and throwbacks.
Doret frames the reception of his work in personal terms. "And it's that acceptance by New York of me that, it just makes me very proud," he said, pointing to a validation that goes beyond a job well done and into cultural belonging. For a designer who now lives across the country, the permanence of the mark and its acceptance in a city he still remembers vividly matters as much as the byline.
Context matters here: Doret is not just a logo designer. His career includes commercial projects in music and film and five Time magazine covers that are part of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's holdings, facts that help explain why the NBA turned to him for a franchise-defining assignment. Still, the Knicks logo stands apart because it is both public and durable—reproduced on courts, merchandise and TV for decades.
The remaining, practical question is narrower but meaningful to fans and brand historians: the exact year the team first used Doret’s subway-token-inspired jersey logo on uniforms is not answered in his account. That gap—when the alternative mark moved from sketch to sleeve—remains the clearest missing fact in a story otherwise anchored by dates, memories and the designer's own satisfaction with the work.
