Logos: VC and PE funds like to put them in their exit slides, startups put their customers, investment banks showcase their M&A deals, CV pages highlight logos of companies people worked for. Logos can create instantly recognizable endorsements by major companies, but it comes at a cost: clutter. Here are some guidelines.
- To declutter your logo page, consider putting them in B&W to reduce the number of colors on your page. Also, adhere to a strict grid when placing them on a page: 5x4, 7x5, etc. (SlideMagic makes it easy to take the color out of an image, and it is not possible to escape the grid)
- Think which logos actually matter: well-known companies. Logos of companies people have never heard from before, just add clutter. Things are even worse when they are written in a language few people can read (Hebrew). On M&A deal pages, consider only putting the logo of the big acquiring company, not the acquired company. On CV/team/bio pages, put only logos of well-known companies and maybe use text for the lesser known ones.
- At some stage there are simply too many logos on a page. For example, the famous industry landscape charts that started off looking decent, but over the years span out of control as more logos got added.
Image by Loren Kerns on Flickr.