All the things you can do when designing SharePoint sites and pages
Tune up the look and feel for consistency and personality.
When it comes to SharePoint design options, some of the best advice I’ve ever overheard is “If you don’t need it, don’t spend time on it.” The context being a SharePoint team site-based solution, an area where you might spend less time on fit and finish. If this is your use case, take that overheard, now-shared advice and stop reading. 🛑
Now, if you want to add a little personality to your site, know that you can. This article focuses on both a top-down method — the SharePoint brand center, the middle-down — theming of SharePoint hub sites, and the side-out options for every site owner — the coveted “Change the look” panel. To round it out, we’ll end things covering numerous other “design” features for SharePoint pages.
OK, let us discover the creative, colorful side of SharePoint. 🎨
SharePoint brand center (Custom fonts, colors, and images)
Every organization has a brand — a set of colors, fonts, and images (ref. organization asset library), that make your communications look and feel like you. The challenge is making sure everyone across your organization can leverage it all consistently.
You can establish a SharePoint brand center as the central location to store and publish numerous brand building blocks to manage and apply your brand.
The result: everyone spends less time searching for or applying the right colors or fonts. The choices will simply appear for them in a managed fashion that makes IT and broader brand ambassadors happy.
Learn more about SharePoint brand center.
Inherit a site theme from a SharePoint hub site
One level down from brand center are hub sites. Hub sites have special powers. You get shared navigation, scoped search across the hub and associated sites, and the ability to roll up content from associated sites with web parts like News, Highlighted content, and Events. And in the context of brand adherence, a SharePoint hub site shares its theme to all its numerous associated sites.
When you associate your site with a SharePoint hub site, your site inherits the look (theme) of the hub site; less design freedom for individual site owners, which is actually a feature (consistency), not a bug. And you can inherit themes and colors from the above-mentioned Brand Center that then can be applied to the hub that then flow right into all its associated sites — a true top-down design model.
NOTE: Sites associated with a SharePoint hub site don’t inherit the permissions of the hub site by default. Users who have permissions to the hub site but not to the associate site don’t see any content from the associated site.
Learn more about SharePoint hub sites.
Site settings > Change the look (Theme, Header, Navigation, Footer)
While your organization’s Brand Center sets the overall standards for your brand and SharePoint hub sites further support consistency, individual site owners may want a bit more control over how their specific site looks and feels. That’s where the Change the look panel comes in.
Change the look is a simple edit pane in SharePoint that lets site owners customize the appearance of their site without needing any special design skills. From the Change the look pane, a site owner can adjust:
Theme — Choose a color palette for your site, either from your organization’s pre-approved options or from SharePoint’s default selections.
Font — Choose the font style (typography package) used throughout the site and for the site title (adjusted in the Header tab).
Header — Control how the top of your site looks: how tall it is, whether the site logo and title appear, and whether you want a background color or image behind them.
Navigation — Site menus can run horizontally or vertically, and whether they expand into a larger “mega menu” style.
Footer — Add links, a logo, and a background color or image (for communication sites).
NOTE: What you see in Change the look may be shaped by what your organization has already set up. If your IT or brand team has defined approved themes or fonts through the Brand Center, those will appear as your options. If you don’t see the Change the look option, either: 1) You’re not a site owner, or 2) The look and feel is being inherited from the parent hub site.
Learn more how to change the look of your SharePoint site and awareness of how to change the look of a hub site and its associated sites.
Additional page design and layout options
Page templates | Microsoft has been rolling out a gallery of new page templates covering common scenarios like training, how-to, trip report, project check-in, and event recap — a healthy set to get a sense of the art of the possible (just know you have to adjust a lot to make them your own).
Sections and columns | You can split pages into one, two, or three columns, add full-width sections, use vertical columns, apply background colors to sections, and use flexible sections to resize and overlap web parts. These are probably the biggest design levers most page creators don’t fully use.
Images & Visual Assets | It never hurts to put an image on the home page. Microsoft offers a wide variety of stock images for your use throughout your intranet. And don’t forget about ALT text for anyone searching for the page or viewing via a screen reader. Last an FYI: You can select a custom background image for your page sections vs. solid colors.
Conditional formatting in lists and libraries | Take design steps to reduce the cognitive load of working in a list or library. Apply colors, visual indicators, and styling automatically based on the data in your list. This helps people scan the information better. Form + Function; my favorite.
In the end…
Beyond making SharePoint fashionable, the look and feel should improve content discovery and add context and clarity to the age-old worker question, “Where am I?” In the workplace, consistency goes a long way. Always test your designs with leaders and peers, across multiple devices. Ensure readability and accessibility. Keep things dynamic. And don’t forget about mobile.
You’ll be surprised at what you can do to shape SharePoint. And be mindful of when you don’t have to.
Cheers, Mark “I play a SharePoint designer on TV” Kashman 🧔🏻♂️