The votes have been tallied. There's a new top dog in Cleveland.
The Browns revealed their new dog logo Monday, as selected by the club's fanbase and players.
Cleveland last updated its dog -- the Browns officially refer to it as a "dawg" -- logo with its 2015 rebrand, from which the team doubled back with the introduction of its current uniform set in 2020. Elements of that 2015 rebrand remained in the team's wordmark, helmet (though the texture from the brown helmet stripes was removed) and color scheme, but the dog logo -- a cartoonish icon that resembled a puppy more than a menacing dog -- remained in the shadows in recent years.
Aware of its need for a replacement mark, the Browns left the decision to their fans, opening their doors for logo submissions and leaving it up to the fans to decide. In the end, the logo submitted by designer Houston Mark emerged victorious.
"We are so excited to unveil a new dawg logo that perfectly encapsulates who we are as a franchise and as a city," executive VP JW Johnson said in a statement published by the team's official website on Monday. "Our fans have been asking us for a new dawg logo for quite some time, so it made perfect sense for them to select the logo themselves and decide how they want our team to be represented -- and they made a great choice."
The logo is loaded with nods -- some more subtle than others -- to the franchise's rich history, including an abstract rendering of the state of Ohio over one of the dog's ears, eight collar spikes to represent the team's eight championships, and even the outline of the city's famed Guardians of Traffic statues, seen within the dog's snout.
"The thing I really wanted to focus on was the fans and the relationship they have with the team," Mark said, via the team's site. "How can I make the Cleveland Browns fanbase the forefront of the design while also maintaining this aggressive, no-nonsense attitude?
"There was a lot of stuff in there I wanted to incorporate because there's so much history to Browns fandom in particular. It was really important for me to honor and respect the history of the fanbase, the championships and the pride that comes with being a fan."
The new logo represents a drastic change in approach for the Browns, who first debuted a dog logo with their return to the NFL as an expansion team in 1999. That logo, a cartoon dog wearing a maskless Browns helmet and holding an orange football in its mouth, represented the famed Dawg Pound section of fans and served as an alternate logo from 1999-2002. The team replaced that logo with a more stoic, realistic depiction of a dog in 2003 and used the logo as a secondary mark until its 2015 rebrand.
