SharePoint-Based Intranets – Leave the Designers at Home

Modern SharePoint gives us few options from a design perspective. That sounds horrible, right? Actually, I see it as a very positive thing. By taking the pixel-pushing out of the mix, we can get people to focus on CONTENT, which is the do or die part of any Intranet.

Over the years, I was able to do a LOT of business (as Sympraxis) making “SharePoint not look like SharePoint”. But that came at a cost on several levels:

• My clients had to pay me to implement a design, which often wasn’t well-suited to SharePoint in the first place. Anyone remember the agony of getting rounded corners on Web Parts in the old days with just CSS?
• We focused a lot on that design, and far less on the content which we’d pour into it. Oftentimes, after we finally got the pixels in the right place, the content wouldn’t even fit into the pages very well!

Modern SharePoint gives us a clean, responsive, open user experience (UI) which few people quibble with. Years ago, many people driving Web site development had come from the print world, so there was a lot of that paper-perfect thinking in the mix. These days – a statistical generation later – most people driving the projects have always worked in the Web. The scales have tipped.

If you look at the SharePoint look book, virtually every one of the designs you see can be accomplished with out of the box settings. That’s a lot of power.

In modern SharePoint, there are several “design surfaces” we can work with:

• Theme(s) – We can devise a theme base on the organization’s primary color palette which can be applied to the Intranet site. We can have multiple themes, but they can only impact the main color palette on the sites. See: SharePoint site theming | Microsoft Docs and Fluent UI Theme Designer (windows.net)
• Imagery – We can create one or more Organizational Assets libraries to contain organizational imagery. These libraries might contain logos, product images, paid stock images, etc., and are available to all Site Owners when they build their sites. See: Create an organization assets library – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs
• Iconography – SharePoint gives us a set of icons we can use for things like Quick Links, but we can also use custom images. For consistency, and simplicity, the out of the box set usually suffices. See: Fluent UI – Styles – React – Fluent UI Icons (microsoft.com) (Scroll down to see the icon set.) The Flicon – Fluent UI Icon Search site makes it easier to search that icon set (maintained by fellow MVP Chris Kent [@theChrisKent]).
• Site Icons – If your department or working group has a logo, the site icon can be that logo. The Intranet itself can have a logo, too. These logos are best created as square images which look good reduced to a fairly small size. In other words, not a lot of fancy details. See: Change the look of your SharePoint site (microsoft.com)
• Page Layouts – This starts to get more into content, but page layouts can be preconfigured for specific types of content, to ensure consistency and familiarity. See: Page templates in SharePoint (microsoft.com)

Anything beyond these design options usually would require custom coding and frankly often isn’t worth the effort. Having a designer available to make suggestions doesn’t hurt, but sometimes they get frustrated by the lack of options! These aren’t old-fashioned Web sites which required us to create an HTML template and CSS in order to get rolling. We can create a site and start working on the content right away, shortening the path to success immensely.