Guides / How to make a sponsor board
How to make a sponsor board
A sponsor board is the page, banner or slide that thanks everyone who paid for your event. It is usually assembled under time pressure from whatever the sponsors sent, which is why so many of them look untidy. The fix is mostly mechanical.
Collect everything before you start laying out
Chase the files first and lay out second. Rearranging 40 logos is quick; redoing the whole board because three more arrived the night before is not.
Ask sponsors for a PNG with a transparent background, or the highest-resolution version they have. If they send a screenshot or a photo of their signage, that is still usable. It just needs its backdrop removing before it will sit properly on a white page.
Decide your tiers before you size anything
Most boards have two or three levels: headline sponsors, a middle tier, then everyone else. Agree this with whoever sold the sponsorship, because the size a logo appears at is often written into the agreement.
Keep the number of tiers small. Three is plenty. Beyond that the differences stop reading as deliberate and start looking like a mistake.
Size on ink, not on bounding box
This is the single thing that separates a tidy board from an untidy one. If you scale every logo to the same width or the same height, a long wordmark will read as enormous next to a compact square badge, and a sparse logo will look lost next to a solid one.
What you actually want is for each logo to carry roughly the same amount of ink, the same visual weight. In practice that means a wide wordmark sits a little smaller than its box suggests and an airy mark a little larger. Do it by eye if you are working by hand: squint at the board, and whichever logo jumps out first is too big.
Handle dark logos differently
A logo designed in white on a black badge will disappear if you knock the black out and drop it on a white page. Keep its background, and put it on a neat rounded tile so it reads as a deliberate choice rather than a mistake.
Conversely, a logo that arrives on a white rectangle needs that rectangle removing, or every logo will sit in a visible box of slightly the wrong white.
Export the right sizes
For print, work at 300dpi. An A3 sheet is 3508 × 4961 pixels, A4 is 2480 × 3508. Anything less and the small print under a logo turns to mush.
For a slide, 1920 × 1080 matches a standard 16:9 deck exactly, so the image lands edge to edge with no scaling. If it is going on a broadcast loop with a lower-third graphic over it, keep the bottom sixth of the frame empty.
Do this automatically
Sponsor Wall does the sizing, background removal and tiering described above, and exports every format at once. Free to organise and preview.