AEW is a very young and already the second-largest wrestling promotion after WWE, which was founded in the United States in 2019. All Elite Wrestling became the first promotion in history to manage to compete with WWE, according to CBS Sports. And the AEW Dynamite TV project, launched in late September of the same year, came in second place in the overall cable program rankings after the NBA.
Meaning and history
The official birth date of the All Elite Wrestling promotion is January 1, 2019, when the company was announced. However, its history started a few years earlier and not in America at all, but in Japan, when wrestlers Kenny Omega, and brothers Matt and Nick Jackson created a team under the pseudonym Young Bucks. The guys also called themselves The Elite.
In 2018, the Jacksons and Cody Rhodes, who joined their gang back in 2016, put on a show – All In in conjunction with Ring of Honor, a promotion that at the time claimed the unofficial third spot behind WWE and TNA. The event was a success, and the team had significant financial backing that allowed them to think about something bigger.
So the idea of their own wrestling promotion was born, the first working name of which was “World’s Elite Wrestling”. However, later the name was changed to All Elite Wrestling (a combination of the name of the event All In and Wrestling).
And AEW’s first pay-per-view show, Double or Nothing, was already announced for May 2019. Pre-sale tickets started on February 10 and within half an hour all tickets were sold out.
In terms of visual identity, All Elite Wrestling fully lives up to its name — brutal and masculine shapes of the characters to represent strength and fighting mood, and a color palette with the golden accent to emphasize the “Elite” part.
2019 – 2023
The very first logo of the All Elite Wrestling promotion was designed in 2019 and stayed active for more than three years. It was a bold geometric abbreviation written in white and gold against a white background and enclosed into a gray square-bracket frame. To be readable on the white banner the white characters of the abbreviation had their surfaces decorated by a gray crack pattern. The full name of the promotion was written on top and at the bottom of the composition, in between the brackets.
2023 – 2024
The redesign of 2023 has kept the style and color palette of the AEW logo, yet refined the contours, made the characters smoother in terms of shades, and switched the colors in the composition: now the abbreviation in white and gold was set on a solid black background and enclosed into a white rectangular frame. The additional lettering was written in the same two lines, also in white and gold.
2024 – Today
In 2024 the AEW logo was refined again, but the main part of the badge, the abbreviation, remained untouched. The change was about the framing and the additional lettering, which are now completely removed from the primary version of the promotion’s logo.
Font and color
The bold uppercase lettering from the primary logo of the AEW promotion is set in a massive and square sans-serif typeface with stencils. The custom font has its characters written with straight lines and angles, thick bars, and a lot of stability in all the elements.
As for the color palette of the AEW visual identity, it is based on the combination of white, gold, and black, which is not only strong and confident, but also sleek and fancy, and it perfectly represents the core idea of the wrestling promotion.