Port did the glowing logo before Wiz

PUBLISHED 2 AUGUST 2026 · BY NIMROD YARKONI

Ask LinkedIn who invented the glowing logo and you will hear one answer: Wiz. The Wiz logo lighting up the feed is the moment the HDR glow trick went mainstream, complete with a wave of "is my screen broken?" comments. But Wiz was not first. Port, the internal developer portal company at port.io, ran a glowing logo on LinkedIn before Wiz did, and versions of the technique had been circulating on Reddit for months before that.

The one that came before

The lineage matters, and it is documented. The underlying technique of splicing an HDR color profile into an ordinary image was first written up publicly by Tom Nick after he spotted a glowing promotion in his own feed. From there it spread quietly: Reddit threads passed it around, Slack ran a glowing workspace logo and later tone-mapped it away, and Port shipped it on LinkedIn ahead of Wiz. When Gal Tidhar reverse-engineered the famous Wiz file, the comments on his post were quick to point out the earlier sightings, and his write-up credits Port with getting there first.

Being early bought Port something interesting: for a while, their mark was often the only thing in the entire feed emitting real extra light. Before the trick was widely known, most viewers had no frame for what they were seeing. The logo just felt impossible to scroll past.

What was actually glowing?

Nothing in the pixels. The image is flat and static. What makes it glow is an HDR color signal that tells an HDR-capable display to render the image's whites in the panel's reserve brightness, well above the roughly 200 nits your screen uses for the white page around it. LinkedIn's upload pipeline strips most HDR metadata but keeps color profiles, so the file arrives in the feed with its glow intact. On SDR screens it looks like a normal logo. The full mechanics of PQ curves and brightness headroom are in the technical write-up.

Why a developer tools brand went first

It is fitting that a dev-tools company was among the earliest adopters. Port sells to developers, and developers are exactly the crowd that downloads a suspicious image and pulls its metadata apart instead of scrolling on. That is how the trick got documented, credited and reproduced: engineers inspecting files, writing teardowns and publishing tools. The trick spread through the same audience Port was marketing to.

Since then the adopters have widened well beyond dev tools: security (Wiz), advertising (Taboola) and sales intelligence (Lusha) have all shown up glowing in the feed. What started as an engineer's curiosity is now a B2B marketing pattern.

The trade-offs Port accepted

• Part of the audience never saw it. Viewers on non-HDR office monitors or phones in battery saver mode saw a normal logo with slightly dimmer whites. High-contrast marks and moderate brightness give the most graceful fallback.
• The effect does not travel. Screenshots, re-saves, cropping in LinkedIn's composer and messenger compression all strip the profile. Only the original exported file glows, so the glow stayed put while screenshots of it looked ordinary. Early on, that was part of the mystique.
• The window closes eventually. Slack has already tone-mapped glowing workspace logos, and platforms clamped the equivalent HDR video trick in short-form feeds. When LinkedIn moves, the same file simply renders as a normal image and nothing breaks.

How to do it with your own logo

Port needed engineers who understood color profiles. You need about a minute:

1. Open superwhite.app and drop in your logo. A white or near-white mark on a colored background works best.
2. Set the peak brightness and the glow threshold so the mark glows and the background stays put. On an HDR screen the live preview shows exactly what your audience will see.
3. Download the HDR JPEG and post it to LinkedIn as a feed image. Do not crop or edit it in the composer, that strips the profile.

Everything runs in your browser and nothing gets uploaded. Sign in, exports from €2.99, unlimited up to 400px.

Frequently asked questions

Did Port really do it before Wiz?

Yes. Independent teardowns of the trend credit Port with running a glowing HDR logo on LinkedIn before Wiz, and versions of the technique circulated on Reddit for months before the Wiz logo made it famous.

Why did the Port logo look brighter than everything else?

Its whites carried an HDR color signal that decodes above normal screen white, so on HDR displays the mark tapped the panel's reserve brightness and physically emitted more light than the interface around it. On non-HDR screens it looked like a regular logo.

Who else has used the trick?

The documented line runs from Tom Nick's original write-up through Port, Slack and AlphaSignal to Wiz, which made it famous, and on to more recent adopters like Taboola and Lusha.

How can I make my logo glow like that?

Embed an HDR color signal so the whites decode above normal screen white. Superwhite does this in the browser: drop in a logo, set the brightness, download the JPEG and post the file directly to LinkedIn without cropping or editing it in the composer.

Does the glow show up in screenshots?

No. Screenshots capture the tone-mapped standard result, and re-saving, cropping or forwarding through messaging apps strips the color profile. Only the original exported file glows.

Will LinkedIn patch it?

Probably eventually. Slack has already tone-mapped glowing workspace logos and platforms clamped the equivalent HDR video trick. Treat it as attention arbitrage with a window. When the window closes, the file simply renders as a normal image.