The Hanwha Eagles are ready to soar even higher next season with their new logos and uniforms, which were unveiled earlier this month.
About two weeks after the conclusion of the 2024 Korean Series in late October, the KBO League team based in Daejeon, South Korea, unveiled a new suite of logos and uniforms for 2025. While the orange remains in their colour palette from previous seasons, it is now complemented by a dark shade of navy blue instead of black.
Eagle-eyed observers on social media have noted that Hanwha’s new script logos and uniforms bear a striking resemblance to those unveiled by Major League Baseball’s Minnesota Twins in November 2022. Both identities were created by designer Matthew Wolff.
The wordmarks include one in cursive script and one in all caps. Both were “developed with the motif of an eagle’s beak and talons,” the team said on social media. The cursive script—used in the primary logo and on both the white home and orange alternate uniforms—is “a modern reinterpretation of the logo from the championship days,” when the Eagles won their only Korean Series in 1999.
Also included in the new suite is an eagle head logo with lightning bolts in the neck. This logo doesn’t appear on the Eagles’ new uniforms, but it is used on their website, on team merchandise, and on a flag that was used in the photo shoots for the new uniforms.
The Eagles’ white home uniforms feature the scripted wordmark in one-colour orange, while the front number is navy blue. The corporate wordmark of the Hanwha Group — a worldwide conglomerate based in Korea that deals in everything from energy to finance — appears in orange on the left shoulder. A single orange stripe runs down each side of the pants.
The grey away uniforms have slightly darker grey pinstripes and a navy blue all-caps wordmark on the front, along with an orange front number. A navy blue stripe runs down each side of the pants.
The Eagles also unveiled two alternate jerseys, one orange and one navy blue. The orange one has a navy blue script wordmark and a white front number, while the navy blue one has a white all-caps wordmark and a white front number. The navy alternate is also the only one where the unveiling photos showed a clear view of the back; in this case, the player name is one-colour white, while the number is one-colour orange.
The Eagles’ social media announcement pictured all four jerseys with the same cap or batting helmet, which has a navy blue base and an orange script “E” on the front.
Along with the Eagles and Twins, Wolff has done design work for Major League Soccer’s Chicago Fire and Los Angeles Football Club; New York/New Jersey Gotham FC, Racing Louisville, San Diego Wave FC and Angel City FC of the National Women’s Soccer League; and USL clubs like Louisville City, Union Omaha and FC Tulsa. He also worked on the typography as part of the rebranding of the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Clippers, which was unveiled in February 2024.
The Hanwha Eagles joined the KBO League in 1986 as the Binggrae Eagles, as Binggrae was the name of Hanwha’s confectionary branch. They changed their name in 1993 when Binggrae separated from the Hanwha conglomerate. They won their only Korean Series championship in 1999 but have been runners-up five times (1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 2006).
