TNWiki Article Spotlight - SharePoint 2013: Creating a Composed Look

Hello and welcome everybody to our TNWiki Article Spotlight on Tuesday.

When I hear someone talking about customizing the design of a SharePoint site the first thing which comes to my mind is Ferrari. Why Ferrari? Years ago someone told me that the Ferrari site was actually a SharePoint site. At that time all SharePoint sites had the same look and feel. Nobody really cared about how a SharePoint looks like. It is just a tool of getting the job done and most of the customers will never see that site, only internal staff. During the last years, something changed. With SharePoint 2010 customizing was one of the hot topics ... but for customizing you still had a lot of work to do and even ASP.NET developers thought that this is way too much. Then came SharePoint 2013. SharePoint 2013 includes a feature called composed look. A composed look makes it easier to define a master page, a color palette, a font scheme and a background image. Geetanjali Arora wrote a nice article about that feature. In SharePoint 2013: Creating a Composed Look you will find some background information around why composed looks were introduced in the first place. After some background there is some talk about how to create a composed look with SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio and a new tool introduced by Microsoft, the SharePoint Color Palette Tool.

If you don't want to let your SharePoint look like any other, have a look at this article. Even if you are not a designer you will find some information on how you change the design with out of the box tooling.

- German Ninja Jan (Twitter, Blog, Profile)