Orlando Magic's new marketing slogan has fans eager for team rebrand

There was a lot of new for the Orlando Magic this week.

The team got its 2025 schedule, setting up one of the most anticipated seasons in Magic history as they aim to build on their playoff appearance last year.

The anticipation has certainly reached some of the players too. Paolo Banchero proclaimed fairly loudly he believes the Magic will be one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference.

The 2025 season feels very real. We are just 50 days away from the start of the preseason.

The Magic used last week as a bit of a reset for themselves. They got the fresh schedule last week to cement their season. They also introduced a new marketing slogan to celebrate the new season.

"Magic Together," the marketing slogan the team has used since the Bubble in 2020, is out. "Make It Magic" is now in.

As the Magic describe it: The new marketing slogan describes everything the Magic do on and off the court. It is a statement of the entertainment they provide on the court and the service that comes off it.

"We're so excited to share our new rally cry with our great city," Orlando Magic Executive Vice President of Marketing and Social Responsibility Shelly Wilkes said in a press release. "In everything we do, the Magic organization strives to Make It Magic, and it truly is a collective effort. It takes all of us coming together to make the atmosphere at the games Magic, to make our community Magic, and to make every interaction and experience with our fans a moment of Magic in their lives."

Marketing slogans are much easier to embrace when the team is winning. The "Be Magic" campaign that the team released amid its rebuild was mocked endlessly because the team could not match the results (there were so many "Be Tanking" jokes). That was nobody's fault, except for the results on the floor.

Everyone is excited about the Magic and fans are eagerly embracing "Make It Magic" as they prepare for the season.

Orlando Magic fans want a rebrand and return to the original logo

But there is something else that has Magic fans excited. The font the team used for its early marketing material has some fans thinking the Magic could be due for a long overdue rebrand, something even Magic CEO Alex Martins has hinted at.

What would a new logo look like with this new wordmarking? Could the Magic return to its beloved original logo and do a complete rebrand?

There are a lot of possibilities. And Magic fans are excited for anything that calls back to the team's original branding—bringing back the star in place of the "a" in Magic is always appreciated.

Magic fans are not in love with the current logo, wordmarking and font. The team has used the same logo since the 2011 season when the team moved into the Kia Center. They have had the same jersey set since the 2009 season (with some slight variations when the team moved from adidas to Nike).

The logo and the jerseys are not terrible. But they are not beloved either. Not like the original logo and jersey set is or even like the logo of the Tracy McGrady era in the early 2000s was.

Magic fans are antsy to see the team rebrand itself a little bit. Especially since the team has clearly entered a new era with Paolo Banchero at the lead.

Most fans seem antsy to see the Magic return to their original jerseys and logo marks. Throwback merchandise and gear to the original logo with the full basketball and stars trailing it are wildly popular—fans still want the throwback quarter zips the coaching staff wears on occasion.

There is no sense the Magic are going to change their logo before this season—those usually take years of development and are announced early in the summer to push out merchandise and have new players display the new logo and any new jerseys.

But a brand change still feels on the horizon. And any change to the team's branding or marketing materials gets fans a bit curious about the changes.

The team has long acknowledged it is considering a rebrand

It at least gets amateur graphic designers thinking a little bit about how to refresh the Magic's look. It is something the team is thinking about.

Martins told Josh Robbins of The Athletic in 2021 the team was studying the potential for a rebrand. He said that he did not necessarily disagree with the notion that fans have a clock with each logo and that it had expired even in 2021 for some tweak or change.

The team just finished celebrating its 35th anniversary and got rave reviews for going back to the T-Mac era jerseys as their Classic Edition jersey for the first time.

Since the 2021 season, the Magic have also experimented with different fonts and branding for their City Edition jerseys—going with the orange jerseys that included a popular version that used the team's original font and jersey design in orange (that we never got a blue version of that was a miss in the City Edition pantheon).

The Magic have gone with the "Kingdom on the Rise" theme using more Medieval-looking fonts and theming for their City Edition jersey in the last two years. Those jerseys have been fairly popular.

Really though, and Omar's design gets to this, fans want a return to as much of the original logo and branding as possible. The NBA will prevent that because of their categorization of old logos as "legacy marks" (teams have to alter their old logos slightly to return to them as the Atlanta Hawks, Detroit Pistons and Utah Jazz have done).

This gets to that. And while Magic fans do not seem in love with the font the team is using for this new marketing campaign, it presents some new possibilities for how the Magic's branding will look.

It is unclear if a rebrand is on the way. The team is surely analyzing how fans react to things like this and testing some new ideas for how the team should look—the City Edition jerseys themselves give an opportunity to test different styles in a fairly low-stakes environment.

For now, the Magic are keeping their same logo and jersey set. But perhaps there are changes on the way, especially as the team cements this new era.