Glowing logos are taking over LinkedIn, and your screen is in on it
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The Wiz mark, the logo that turned a display quirk into a marketing trend.
Every few months the same scene repeats on LinkedIn. Someone scrolls past a company logo that appears to be lit from behind, brighter than anything else on the screen, brighter than the white page it sits on. They take a screenshot to show a colleague. The screenshot looks completely normal. Then comes the post: is my screen broken, is my GPU dying, what is happening.
Nothing is broken. The logo is borrowing brightness your screen was saving for movie night.
The wave keeps repeating
Port.io ran a glowing logo early, and versions of the trick circulated on Reddit before that. Slack had one in its workspace switcher until it quietly tone-mapped the effect away. Then Wiz, the cloud security company acquired by Google, put a glowing white mark in the LinkedIn feed and made the whole thing famous. AlphaSignal, an AI newsletter, has run one as its company logo for months, prompting at least one engineer to pull the file apart in public and call it a Trojan Horse JPEG. This week the trend produced a fresh round of teardowns and explainers, and the cycle started again.
Each wave follows the same script: confusion, screenshots that prove nothing, a technical post explaining the trick, a burst of brands trying it themselves, and a handful of comments asking everyone to please have mercy on their retinas.
What is actually happening on your screen
Modern phone and laptop displays are far brighter than the white you normally look at. Your operating system renders regular white around 200 nits for comfort, while the panel itself can push 1,000 nits or more. The difference is reserved headroom, used for HDR video highlights.
A glowing logo is a regular image file carrying an HDR color signal, which tells the display to render its whites inside that reserve. The result is a static image that physically emits more light than the interface around it. Your eye goes to the brightest object in view whether you want it to or not. That reflex is the entire marketing mechanism.
It also explains the broken-screenshot mystery. A screenshot captures what the interface looks like in standard range, not the HDR signal inside the original file, so the glow never survives the copy. The full technical breakdown is in our teardown of the Wiz logo glow.
Why LinkedIn, of all places
Platforms process every uploaded image, and most of them strip the HDR signal in the process. Reddit converts images to a standard color space. Instagram requires a different HDR format entirely. LinkedIn happens to preserve ICC color profiles when it re-encodes feed images, which makes it the one major feed where a properly prepared JPEG keeps its glow. Company page logos pass through with even less processing. For a trick that lives or dies on surviving a compression pipeline, LinkedIn is simply where it still works.
The backlash is part of the story
Not everyone is charmed. Every wave produces comments about eye strain, requests to change the logo back, and viewers on non-HDR office monitors who see either a normal image or a slightly washed-out one and wonder what the fuss is about. The lesson brands keep relearning is that maximum brightness is not the goal. A moderate glow stands out from the feed without reading as glare, which is why the tools built for this now ship with a brightness control instead of defaulting to the panel's ceiling.
Rule of thumb from watching every wave of this trend: the brands that got praised used a restrained glow on a high-contrast mark. The ones that got roasted maxed it out.
How long does the window stay open?
Attention tricks on platforms tend to have a lifecycle. HDR video went through the same arc on Reels and Shorts before platforms clamped peak brightness. Slack has already patched glowing workspace logos. LinkedIn has not moved yet, and until it does, a static image can out-shine everything else in the feed for the cost of a color profile.
That makes this less a permanent branding strategy and more a window of attention arbitrage. When it closes, the same files simply render as normal images. Nothing breaks, the glow just retires.
Try it on your own logo
If you want to see your own mark glow before the window closes, Superwhite does the whole thing in your browser. Drop in a logo, pick how bright, download, post to LinkedIn without cropping. Nothing gets uploaded to any server, and there is a slider precisely so you can be the brand that gets praised.
Make your logo glow