SharePoint Brand Center

The SharePoint brand center is a centralized branding management solution that enables your brand managers or authorized brand owners to assist your company in customizing the appearance and feel of their experiences. This new brand asset management system allows you to manage all your brand colors, fonts, photos, and other materials in one location.

Overview

The brand center stores and manages assets in the background leveraging the SharePoint Organization Asset Library (OAL). The brand center app resides in a specific site collection within your tenant.

The brand center app allows you to view and manage all your organization’s brand assets in one place. Using the brand center app, you can ensure that your organization’s brand identity is consistent and professional across all communication platforms. You may also save time and money by minimizing duplication and confusion with brand assets, as well as enabling your workers to produce high-quality branded content.

Setting up the Brand Center

Setting up a SharePoint Brand Center can be an excellent way to manage and share your organization’s branding assets. Here’s how you can set it up step by step:

Note: Verify you have Global Admin privileges for your tenant (this is needed for you to set up the Brand Center).

1. Open the M365 Admin Center. Under Settings, choose Org settings, then Servicestab, then Brand Center

2. On the following screen, you must provide the Name/URL for the Brand Center. If you have already created Organization Assets Document Libraries for storing company-wide photos, logos, and templates, then the site you used for the libraries will also serve as the Brand Center’s website. As a result, the URL for the Brand Center will be prepopulated with that URL, which you will be unable to modify. If you have never built up an Org Assets library, you can provide the Name/URL for your Brand Center.

3. Next, select the checkbox next to “I agree to activate the public CDN.”. Then, click the Activate
4. Now, the Brand Center is set up, and you may visit it using the URL given.

When a site is registered as Brand Center, it receives a new option under the Gear Icon, allowing brand managers (Site Owners only) to rapidly make use of all available Brand Center functions (upload fonts, build themes, etc.).

Available features in the Brand Center App

The brand center app offers you the possibility to upload and set organisation wide fonts. You can define a set of company colors usable by brand managers. It is also possible to define global themes to be used across your SharePoint as well as font packages. Lastly, it is possible to configure the viva connections experience also with Themes and Font packages.

1. Manage Fonts:

To manage your fonts, go to the brand center app and click Brand fonts.

Then, click Upload.

There are four font formats that you can use:

1. True Type fonts (.ttf)
2. Open Type fonts (.otf)
3. Web Open Font Format (.woff)
4. Web Open Font Format 2.0 (.woff2)

If you have a proprietary font or want to use any kind of custom font within your SharePoint, that’s how you ensure it can be used across your organization.

2. Manage colors:

Managing brand colors is another useful feature in the SharePoint brand center app. Begin by clicking Brand Colors.

You can choose and name your organization main and accent colors to be used during theme creation for your SharePoint sites. To add a new color, click Add a color.

Adding a color is simple. The best approach is to utilize your brand’s hex color values, but you may alternatively choose specific colors from a common color palette. Include a title for the color. If you want this color to be available later when creating themes, turn the Visible option on.

3. Create new themes and font packages:

The ability to design and oversee your own themes and font packages for your SharePoint sites and manage them globally is an essential feature of the brand center app. These developed specific themes and font packages will be available for site owners to choose from in Change the Look.

Select SharePoint or Viva Connections from under “Apply your brand” to start creating your custom themes and font packages.

You can then select “New font package” or “add theme” to start creating your brand assets.

• Theme Designer Experience (From Site Branding blog)

1. Select + New theme to start the theme designer experience.

2. Choose your preferred colors for the Primary, Text, Background and Accent colors of your theme.

• • Primary color: The primary color is central to your brand identity and personality.  This color is used predominantly in your sites and experiences.
  • Text color: This color is used for the text in your experiences. Consider how this color will work with your selected primary and background colors.
  • Background color: The background color is used behind your text and images to display all the content in your sites and experiences.
  • Accent color: This color is used sparingly to complement your primary color and enhance your content.

Accent colors are mainly used on text overlays and shading. Example in text over image colored in red:

Note: Your organization may have provided a set of predefined brand colors that you can utilize to create your theme:

3. The Dark theme setting for your theme.  This setting should be considered if you have customized your background color in your theme.  If you have used a light color for your background color of your theme this will remain off. If you have used a dark or darker color for the background color of your theme you should turn this setting on.

Note: The dark theme will automatically modify the text and other menu elements to feature lighter colors for better visibility. This option is mainly used for themes with dark backgrounds.

4. To finalize the theme creation process, assign a distinctive name to your theme and proceed to save it. This designated name will be visible within the ‘Change the look’ interface.

A concise preview of the created site theme’s appearance will be available for your review. It is imperative to confirm that your site adheres to all accessibility guidelines and maintains sufficient contrast levels.

• Font Package Experience (From Site Branding blog)

Customizing your website with your own font bundle is another benefit of site branding.

1. Select + New font package to launch the font package designer experience.
   • Step 1: Use the font picker to specify font families for display and content text. You may select up to two unique font families, with the flexibility to assign the same font family to both display and content components, if desired.

1. • Step 2: Select a font family and a font style for each one of the four font slot mappings: Title, Headline, Body and Interactive. Make use of the preview function to see the changes
   • Step 3: Give your font package a name, then you can preview it in various settings. When you apply this special font package name to your site, it will show up in the “Change the look” experience.

Conclusion

SharePoint’s new brand center allows users to choose fonts, colors, and other design elements that represent the identity of their organization, company, products, and more. Users may maintain a consistent digital appearance by utilizing these branding components across all intranet sites. Branding and customizing your SharePoint experience has never been easier.