How to make a logo wall in PowerPoint

At BrightCarbon we can’t help ourselves when we get a viewer request for a top tip or PowerPoint demo. We love to spread the joy and love of PowerPoint, so when we heard that George needed a bit of help making his logo wall in PowerPoint, we figured we could jump in.

What is a logo wall or a logo slide?

In professional sports, like Formula 1, players and team members are often interviewed in front of a wall of sponsor logos. As well as providing a handy background, it’s a nice bit of extra exposure for all those companies forking out to have their name associated with some of the world’s sporting elite.

But logo walls aren’t just an interview prop, in the presentation world we see them All. The. Time.

What do I mean? Almost all organisations have a so-called logo slide in their slide library – a slide containing logos of all the big brands they’ve worked with. This is particularly common in the B2B space where it’s often used as a credibility building tool.

How to make a logo slide in PowerPoint

In the interests of teaching a man to fish, I’m going to show you how to build a logo slide of your own. Where normally I’d swoop in with a handy download, because all logos are different, and each organisation will be using a different set of logos and a different number, there are no shortcuts to making this one yourself. Remember, shortcuts lead to track limits violations.

1. Set up your slide

Open up your corporate template and let’s get going.

At this point in the process, it’s worth saying that if, like George, you’re making a logo wall, you need to set the size of your canvas in PowerPoint to match the size of the logo wall you’ll be using. This is really easy to do in PowerPoint, and you can learn all about that here.

2. Design your background

Given that all logos are different shapes and sizes, different proportions, different styles, different colours, it’s virtually impossible to make everything sit together nicely and cohesively. One thing you can do, however, is to unify your logos by making them the same colour, and if you make all your logos white, you have the design freedom to give your slide a more impactful, dark background.

If your PowerPoint template has a dark variant or layout, you might want to choose that option, or instead you can design your own by right clicking on the slide and opening the ‘format background’ menu.

Use the gradient tools if you want to make something that has a bit of depth or texture to it.

3. Source and format your logos

Next you need to get the logos you want to use. Your organisation might have a repository to choose from, but to be honest there are plenty of freely available logo files online, and a quick Google search for the one you’re looking for will most likely be the fastest option.

Your logo files will be one of three file formats, and the way you format the logo will depend on the type of file you have.

SVG – Scalable Vector Graphic

If you use icons in presentations you’ve likely used svg files before. They give you the most flexibility when it comes to editing an object.

In PowerPoint you can change the colour of your svg or vector file simply by clicking the fill colour options.

PNG – Portable Network Graphic

A png is an image file and its party piece is that it can maintain a transparent background. Once you have your png file in PowerPoint, to change it to white there’s a little trick you can do.

Right click your picture and open the Format Picture menu.

Navigate to Picture Corrections and pull the Brightness slider to 100%.

Lovely.

JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group

Who knew that’s what jpeg stood for? At least you’ll be all set for your next pub quiz.

Bringing in a logo as a jpeg involves an extra step. A jpeg doesn’t have a transparent background, so upping the brightness like we did with the png will just leave you with a stylish white box.

Instead, we can use the ‘Set Transparent Colour’ option in the Picture Format ribbon in PowerPoint to knock out the background colour.

Next, we copy the image and paste it into PowerPoint again. Why? This acts as a clean paste, and – because it has a transparent background – will paste the image back in as a png.

Now we have a png and you can follow the steps above to change the colour by altering the brightness.

4. Arrange your logos

Your logo slide is taking shape, and PowerPoint has some pretty nifty in-built tools for arranging your logos on the page. Align and distribute will make sure your logos are evenly spaced and have the same horizontal mid-point.

From PowerPoint’s Home ribbon you can find them by clicking ‘Arrange’ and then hovering over the ‘Align’ option. If that sounds too much like hard work, get yourself a handy Quick Access Toolbar to put those shortcuts directly above your workspace. If you want one pre-programmed, you can get it here.

Let’s say you tried that, but there’s something a little off. Depending on the way it was created, the logo file may have a large border around the graphic, or it might go right up to the edges of the object. This means that even though the objects are evenly distributed, the spacing won’t be consistent graphic to graphic.

Instead, you’re going to have to design this one by eye. But you can use a couple of guides to help you create something that looks relatively neat and tidy.

Just like we did when we were practicing our handwriting at school, make a top and bottom line – the logo should sit between these two lines, ideally with a bit of breathing space at the top and bottom. Also make a central line. Some logos look unbalanced if you line them up by their true centre point, so judge by eye where the logo feels most balanced and line that up with your centre point line.

Finally evenly distribute your logos by using a manual spacer. Remember that because different logos have different bounding boxes, you’ll have to do it by moving your spacer along and measuring from the edge of one logo to the next.

5. Share it

Finally you need to share your creation. If you’re like George and you need to get this ready for the printers, you can export to PDF from PowerPoint in just a couple of clicks.

If this is a slide that you want to share with your team we have another tool that can help you do that really easily too. BrandIn serves up your best slide content and makes it available for all your team members to use without ever having to leave PowerPoint. Read more about BrandIn here (and psst, it’s free for up-to 4 users).

You don’t just have to do this with fully-designed slides, you can also take all your logo files and drop them into BrandIn too.

Logo slides: Some extra things to consider

After all that, I do want to leave you with a few words of warning. I’ve seen a fair few presentations in my time and I think logo slides are a bit like egg slicers. Unfathomably, tonnes of people have one (especially if they’ve been around a while), but they’re really not that useful.

These slides tend to come early on in a sales deck and pad out the ‘about us’ section of the presentation. Prospects settle in for a gentle bedtime story on ‘our company history, who we’ve worked with, where our offices are, and who is in charge of Pizza Fridays’ (okay, maybe not that last one). Yes, it may be cool to know you’ve worked with some of the Big Names, but to a prospect it’s just an extended exercise in naval gazing that they would rather have as an email.

To include or not to include then? Here are a few questions to help you evaluate:

• What are my competitors doing? It might be that your competitors have a very similar slide to yours and it may seem like table stakes to include yours as well. It may be that you’ve worked with companies who are more recognisable, or even just more of them. If this slide provides a genuine apples-to-apples comparison with your competitors and you come out on top, it may be worth it to keep it in, but be explicit about why you’re including it and make it easy for the prospect to see you’re stronger than your competitors.
• Do I work with enough recognisable names? This slide is meant to quickly – and I mean quickly – build credibility and show that you’ve had a number of relevant business engagements. If you can’t muster up enough household names, or you don’t have a particularly large book of business, throwing up a logo slide will probably raise more questions than it answers.
• Do I work with too many recognisable names? Wait, is there such a thing!? If you’re pitching to a smaller company, they may actually be intimidated to see that you work with a lot of well-known brands. Who’s to say you won’t prioritise the bigger players, or even that you have the expertise to work with brands who are smaller and less known.
• Can I provide examples if asked? Saying you’ve worked with a company that everyone has heard of might mean you can put the logo on the slide, but what was the nature of that work? Did the client come back for more? Be prepared that your prospect may probe and ask questions. If you don’t have good examples on hand, or if it turns out that there isn’t much of an existing working relationship, you may end up losing credibility instead of gaining it.

There is another way, however. By switching up your presentation intro to be all about your client or prospect you can deep dive into their needs, their challenges, their unique situation, and lay the foundation for exactly how you and your unique organisation can help them. Want to turn your presentation intro on its head? No problem – have a watch of this video.

And so, what of your logo slide? Turn it into a case studies slide. Provide a number of relevant examples that walk through how you were able to address challenges and solve problems that will resonate with your prospect. If you have examples of household names, that’s great, but to be honest, your prospect will probably be more impressed with examples of how you’ve been able to help companies that are similar to them, and have a similar set of challenges.