Is there best practice when displaying other brands, such as partners or clients, on your website? Full color or greyscale?

Question

We're debating an issue which I'm not entirely sure should be up for discussion.

We have a dozen or so partners who's logos we're displaying on our website. Both our web/marketing designer and I strongly believe these logos should be greyscale. Our two strongest arguments are…

1. Those brands use colors which conflict with our brand, causing brand confusion and/or brand inconsistency.
2. Displaying multiple full color logos, all with different brand colors, adds visual complexity, noise, and clutter to .com

Does anyone have any suggestions, references, opinions on "Best practice" when displaying this kind of content?

If so, would you please explain?

Thank you

Answer 1

If it helps you win the debate I can only say I agree with you entirely. In fact I would say it's become a de facto standard to render logos of partner companies in grey-scale for the reasons you state.

Those logos are there to add credibility to your brand, not to "steal the show" with what are likely to be bright colours.

Grey-scale is the perfect way to imply psychologically "these guys are WITH us, but in the context of our brand, just slightly less important THAN US".

If you are forced to compromise, you could suggest that the logos go full colour on hover.

Look how Cloudera approach the problem (happened to be looking at this site today). Grey-scale logos "first" on their home page but when you click through to actually FOCUS on their customers they let them shine in full colour as they are not the SUBJECT of the page. The subject of the Cloudera home page, is, as it should be, Cloudera.