Stop Treating Brand Logos Like Clip-Art

So, You Pasted a Logo Into Your LinkedIn Banner. Now What?

The Quiet Habit Everyone Pretends Is Fine

Open LinkedIn on any given day, and you’ll see it: article covers and carousels plastered with other people’s logos. Big tech, luxury brands, SaaS unicorns, all chopped into hero images to make posts look more “professional” and scroll-stopping.

Most of the time, nothing happens. No angry email from legal. No DMCA takedowns. Just likes, reposts, and that satisfying little “this looks like a real publication” feeling.

But behind that harmless design choice sit two bodies of law that very much care about logos: copyright and trademark. And while they are not waiting to pounce on every LinkedIn thought-leader, they absolutely can bite when you wander over the wrong line.

If you ever dragged a brand logo into your article artwork “because everyone else does it,” this is your reality check.

This is not a panic piece. It is the grown-up version: what logos are legally, when using them in article artwork is defensible, where the grey zones live (hello, LinkedIn), where the red lines start, and how you can make smarter choices without turning your posts into beige legal disclaimers.

Logos Are Not Just Pictures – They Are Legal Landmines

From a lawyer’s perspective, a logo is rarely just a nice piece of graphic design. It usually sits on two legal foundations at once.

First, there is copyright. Many jurisdictions treat logos as original artistic works: someone designed it, and that creative expression is protected from copying. In Europe, for example, a logo can be protected as a copyright work if it shows sufficient originality, and separately as a trademark if it functions as a badge of origin.

Then there is trademark law, which is the serious part. The whole job of a trademark is to tell people “these products or services come from this source.” Using someone else’s logo is not just “copying an image,” it is touching the signal they use to identify themselves in the market. That is why trademark owners get twitchy when their logos pop up in places they did not approve.

The key legal fear is confusion. If your post or artwork makes people think the brand endorsed, sponsored, or is partnered with you, you are wandering toward trademark infringement, even if your intentions were pure. U.S. and EU guidance alike focus on whether your use of the mark is likely to mislead consumers about source, affiliation, or sponsorship.

So yes, copying a logo is “just image editing” in Photoshop. In law, it is a move on a live chessboard.

When Using a Logo Is Actually Allowed

Here is the good news: the law does not require you to pretend brands do not exist. If you write about a product, review a tool, or compare competitors, you are generally allowed to name them and, in many cases, show their marks.

In the U.S., this falls under doctrines such as nominative fair use. Courts have recognized that you sometimes need to use a brand’s name or logo in order to refer to the brand itself or compare products. If you are talking about Tesla, you do not say “a certain electric car manufacturer headquartered in Austin” for three pages. You say “Tesla.” You may even show the logo if that is the most straightforward way to identify what you are talking about.

Similarly, practical guides and treatises explain that editorial or informational uses – news, reviews, commentary – often do not require permission, as long as you are not creating confusion about endorsement. Nolo’s widely cited guidance is blunt about it: you generally do not need a license to use a trademark if it is for editorial or informational use, such as in a newspaper article, book, or non-misleading blog post.

In other words, if you are genuinely talking about the brand, clearly labeling your content as commentary or analysis, and not making it look like the brand is sponsoring you, then using the brand’s name and, sometimes, logo is legally defensible.

That is why newspapers, magazines, and serious blogs routinely show logos in comparison charts, product reviews, and “Company X vs Company Y” explainers. They are not getting bespoke logo licenses for each article. They are leaning on a long-standing practice of editorial reference and, when needed, nominative fair use.

The LinkedIn Problem: Editorial Content in a Commercial Suit

Now for the bad news: LinkedIn is not a newspaper.

Even when you are “just writing an article,” you are doing it inside a commercial platform, tied to your personal brand, your consulting, your agency, your book, or your next keynote. Several commentators and legal guides point out that courts increasingly treat business social media as commercial use for trademark purposes, even when the specific post is educational in tone.

That does not mean your logo use is automatically illegal. It means the law is more likely to see your use through an advertising / promotion lens than a purely neutral editorial one. You are not The New York Times; you are a business talking about another business, on a platform that is explicitly about business.

This is where the grey zone starts.

If your image simply shows a logo as part of a clear “Brand X vs Brand Y: Pros, cons, legal issues” article, with your own brand clearly visible, most lawyers would still see that as a form of comparative editorial use.

If your cover art stacks ten logos under your face and headline – “Trusted by…” – when none of those companies have actually hired you, you are sliding into a very different category. That is the classic “implied endorsement” scenario trademark owners are trained to hunt.

LinkedIn sits right on the border. You are informing and marketing at the same time. The more your design looks like an ad, the less shelter you get from the editorial side of the law.

Where You Really Start to Scare Legal Departments

There are uses of logos that reliably trigger frowns from IP lawyers, regardless of platform.

You raise the risk when you turn logos into your own branding. That happens when you use other people’s marks as a design system for yourself: building your hero banner around them, putting them directly under your name and photo, or dropping them into your website header as if they were clients, partners, or sponsors. Guidance for advertisers is very clear: you generally cannot use a third party’s trademark in your advertising without permission, unless you are in a carefully structured comparative ad that is not misleading.

You also raise the risk when you alter logos. Many brand-guideline documents explicitly ban recoloring, stretching, stacking, or otherwise remixing the logo in ways that could damage or dilute the mark. Even if those guidelines are “just” contractual documents, they reflect a legal concern: the more you distort the logo, the harder it is to argue you are merely identifying the brand.

And you definitely raise the risk when you combine logos with claims that sound like endorsements. “Partnered with,” “trusted by,” “official,” “certified,” or “used by our clients” all read like signals that there is a business relationship. If that relationship does not exist, you have built the perfect fact pattern for a trademark demand letter.

None of this means a judge will instantly drop a hammer on someone for a flashy LinkedIn carousel. But it is why IP lawyers flinch when they see a nice, clean analysis post wrapped in artwork that looks like guerrilla co-branding. The content says “commentary.” The design screams “ad.”

How to Use Logos in Article Artwork Without Losing Sleep

There is no risk-free way to paste someone else’s logo into your content. There are, however, smarter and dumber ways to do it.

The safer end of the spectrum looks like a regular editorial visual. You are clearly commenting on the brand. Your own identity is front and center. The logo is there to help readers instantly recognize which product or company you are talking about, not to borrow their credibility. Think “tech news explainer” rather than “launch campaign.”

You help yourself when your article and artwork make three things obvious.

First, you are talking about the brand, not pretending to be it. The logo appears in contexts that are clearly analytical or descriptive: comparisons, reviews, case studies, “what went wrong” pieces, and legal breakdowns. The headline and text support that frame.

Second, you are the origin of the content, not the brand. Your own name, company, or project branding is visually stronger than the borrowed logos. The page looks like your publication about them, not their publication about you.

Third, you are not promising or implying a relationship that does not exist. You do not say or visually suggest “partner,” “client,” or “sponsor” unless you actually have that relationship and permission to say so. The law is generally more tolerant of sharp criticism than of warm-and-fuzzy fakery.

If you want to push risk down even further, you can step away from logos entirely and still make strong visuals. You can use text labels in a neutral font, abstract shapes in similar color families, or symbolic imagery that evokes the category without copying the mark. It is less visually satisfying than dropping the official logo in, but drastically less likely to make an in-house lawyer spit out their coffee.

For Legal Professionals: Why This Keeps Coming Up

If you work in IP or marketing law, you already know the doctrinal pieces: trademark infringement, likelihood of confusion, tarnishment, comparative advertising, nominative and descriptive fair use, and the messy way courts apply them.

What has changed is the scale and speed at which non-lawyers are making design decisions that look, to them, purely aesthetic and, to you, trivially actionable. LinkedIn, YouTube thumbnails, podcast covers, Substack headers, and “launch” carousels have turned visual borrowing into a reflex. Everyone sees everyone else doing it. Very few people stop to think “Lanham Act” before they drag five enterprise logos into Figma.

For brands, the result is a quietly spreading layer of quasi-co-branding they did not authorize. For creators, it is a legal blind spot that only becomes visible when a platform, agency, or rights holder finally pushes back.

There is an opportunity here for legal teams who speak creator language. Instead of just issuing guidelines that say “never use our logo without permission,” there is room for clearer, more nuanced playbooks: where editorial use is tolerated, where comparative advertising is acceptable, and where the line is drawn for social-media-native visuals. The alternative is the current pattern: a mix of over-cautious people who never mention brands and over-confident people who turn their LinkedIn profiles into unauthorized partner walls.

So, Should You Stop Using Logos Altogether?

Not necessarily.

If you never touch any third-party IP, your content will be very safe and very dull. Brands exist; you are allowed to talk about them. You are allowed to show what you are talking about. You are allowed to criticize, compare, dissect, and review. The law is supposed to leave room for that.

But you should stop treating logos as free, decorative assets. They are not clip-art. They are legal signals. If you use them, use them because you genuinely need them to identify the subject of your article, not because your header looked empty. Make the context clearly editorial. Make your own brand unmistakably the source. Avoid the visual language of partnership unless there is, in fact, a partnership.

And if you are planning a big campaign, a paid course, or a homepage redesign built around someone else’s logos, that is not a “quick Canva job.” That is “call an IP lawyer first” territory.

Important Disclaimer

This article is for general information and discussion. It is not legal advice. Trademark and copyright rules differ by jurisdiction, and the application of doctrines such as fair use and nominative use can vary significantly between courts and over time.

If you have a specific campaign, website, course, or social media strategy that relies heavily on third-party logos, you should speak with a qualified intellectual property lawyer who can look at your exact facts, your jurisdictions, and your risk tolerance before you hit “publish.”