Showing off your customers - building a logo page in PowerPoint (or something different)
Many of the startup clients I serve are keen to show off their customer list. Almost all of them do it using a page full of company logos scraped of web pages.
Why do most of them look so bad?
Image credit: Stabilo Boss'
web 2.0 logo page on Flickr.
About the something different. Bigger companies can use another concept, describing where their products are used at any moment in time. Microsoft for example, could put an image of a busy Paris boulevard and put small arrows with a Microsoft logo inside and point it at stores, cafes, offices, someone talking into a mobile phone, etc. All to indicate that the company has millions of customers in all possible consumer and business segments.
- Different sizes
- Different colors
- Not evenly distributed over the page
- Not all images are of high quality
Some guide lines on how to let them look better, some of which are easy, some of which take more time:
- Build a grid. Count the number of logos you need to put up. Build a nicely distributed x by y matrix of rectangular boxes that fits them all. Now all logos will look evenly spread.
- Use a white background, or make at least the boxes (described above in 1.) white, most logos come on white
- Use the "press toolkit" of a company to download the official logo
- If not available, use Google Image search to find clean logos (not the ones with background graphics at the top loft corner of web pages), the bigger the size, the better (they look sharper when you shrink them)
- If the logo is only available with a colored background, find the RGB color of it (in Paint, or another graphics program) and make the color of the box (described in 1.) exactly the same
- Crop out any marketing slogans ("we try harder") etc. from the logo
- To make the slide a bit more calm, you can take the color out of all the logos and replace them with a monochrome overlay consistent with your slide color scheme. The point is to show lots of logos, not neccesarily introduce a lot of colors to your slide.
Image credit: Stabilo Boss'
web 2.0 logo page on Flickr.
About the something different. Bigger companies can use another concept, describing where their products are used at any moment in time. Microsoft for example, could put an image of a busy Paris boulevard and put small arrows with a Microsoft logo inside and point it at stores, cafes, offices, someone talking into a mobile phone, etc. All to indicate that the company has millions of customers in all possible consumer and business segments.