Brand Kits in Microsoft 365: Two Features, One Goal — and Why You Should Care About Both
A few days ago I stumbled across something I hadn’t seen before: a Microsoft Support article titled “Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app“, thanks to fellow MVP Natanael Mignon posting about it in a conversation we were having in the MVP channels. I tossed it into our internal The Water Cooler chat and asked the team: “Have any of you heard about this capability? Know how it meshes with Brand Center?”
That question turned into a rabbit hole. It turns out Microsoft now has [at least, that I’m aware] two distinct branding features in the M365 ecosystem — the SharePoint Brand Center and the newer M365 Copilot Brand Kit — and while they share a goal (consistent branding across your organization), they work in completely different parts of the platform and serve somewhat different purposes. This post captures what I found, what I built, and what I think it means for organizations using Microsoft 365.
Setting the Stage: Why Branding in M365 Has Always Been Tricky
When I’m working with clients on SharePoint and Microsoft 365 deployments, one of the first things they sometimes say is: “Can we make it look less like SharePoint?” That’s the eternal question, and for good reason. Out-of-the-box SharePoint looks like… SharePoint. And while that’s fine for many organizations, those with established brand identities understandably want their intranet, their presentations, and their employee-facing materials to feel like their organization. Modern SharePoint looks great, but you still want it to reflect your brand.
The challenge is that Microsoft’s branding tools have evolved in layers over the years — there are “old” themes and “modern” themes, the SharePoint Brand Center is a site with special capabilities, and now there’s a brand-new Copilot-era feature called Brand Kits. Keeping all of this straight takes some research. Here’s what I found.
Part 1: The SharePoint Brand Center
What It Is
The SharePoint Brand Center has been around for a while, but it’s still not as widely understood or used as it should be. Here’s how I explained it to a client during a recent engagement:
“This is basically a communications site with some special superpowers. The brand center is the place where you can instantiate as many brands as you want to have. For example, you could have a different brand for each school or division. And you can centrally manage all of them from one place.”
A few important things to know about the SharePoint Brand Center:
- You can only have one Brand Center per tenant. It’s a singleton: there’s no second one. Microsoft set it up this way intentionally so that branding has a single authoritative home.
- Within that one Brand Center, you can define multiple brands — so a university could have one brand per school, and a company with sub-brands could manage all of them from the same place.
- Brands created in the Brand Center become available in “Change the Look” across SharePoint sites, which is how you apply them to your intranet.
- The Brand Center is not obvious to find. There’s no clear indicator in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center pointing you to it. If you have permissions, you can spot it — but otherwise it can be invisible.
What the Brand Center Manages
According to the upcoming Ask Sympraxis session on this topic, the Brand Center covers three main areas:
| Feature | What it controls |
| Brand Colors | The theme palette applied to SharePoint sites. SharePoint works with a handful of color slots (primary, text, background) and extrapolates variations for different UI components. |
| Themes | Themes for SharePoint sites and the SharePoint app in Teams (formerly Viva Connections). There are legacy “old” themes and newer “modern” themes — both can be applied, and modern themes can even be deployed via scripting/automation. |
| Font Packages | Custom font packages for SharePoint. This is powerful but comes with a significant gotcha — see the Font Licensing section below. |
The Practical Reality of SharePoint Themes
One thing I’ve seen catch organizations by surprise is how limited the SharePoint theme palette actually is. Your full brand guide might have 10–12 colors. SharePoint lets you work with essentially three:
- Primary color
- Text color
- Background color
SharePoint then extrapolates variations — creating lighter and darker tints of your primary color for different UI elements. It’s quite clever, but it does mean you need to think carefully about which colors from your brand guide are doing the most heavy lifting.
In reality, those three colors are enough high-level branding. Your content should provide the rest, with styling consistency, images which reflect the brand, etc. That’s where the Brand Kit idea comes in, as long as you have Copilot licenses.
Accessibility is also a real concern here. Brand colors that look great on printed materials don’t always pass WCAG contrast requirements when used together on screen. I’ve found the Fluent UI Theme Designer invaluable for testing color combinations before committing to them. For example, when working with a client whose brand colors were maroon and slate gray, the original pairing failed the accessibility check — requiring us to default to black text to preserve the maroon as a primary brand color while still passing contrast requirements.
💡 Practical advice on fonts Unless your organization has a strong, documented requirement for a custom font in SharePoint, the built-in font packages from Microsoft are often the pragmatic choice. They’re licensed for the web and app environments, universally supported, and render reliably. If you do introduce a custom font, do the licensing homework first.
Part 2: The M365 Copilot Brand Kit — The New Kid on the Block
What It Is
The M365 Copilot Brand Kit is a newer feature, and it lives in a completely different part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem than the SharePoint Brand Center. It’s accessed through the Create section of the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (m365.cloud.microsoft) — which, I’ll admit, took me an embarrassingly long time to find. It’s in the waffle menu on that page.
Per Microsoft’s documentation, the purpose of Brand Kits in this context is to give brand managers the ability to create and maintain official brand elements that are then available to all employees when generating on-brand materials in Copilot — presentations, images, documents, and more.
A Brand Kit in M365 Copilot can contain:
- Multiple logos
- Color palettes
- Fonts
- Images
- Templates (for presentations and other content)
My First-Hand Experience: Creating the Sympraxis Brand Kit
After discovering this feature, I decided to build one myself. I created a Brand Kit for Sympraxis by uploading assets we already had stored in our existing Brand folder on SharePoint. The process was relatively straightforward — I pulled logos, color palettes, and templates that we had already organized in our Marketing site.
I then set up a Brand Manager Policy (See: Microsoft Learn: Enterprise Brand Manager Policy Setup) and added only myself as a test. This policy controls who in the organization can create and edit Brand Kits — everyone else can still use them. It’s a sensible governance model.
🔑 Key takeaway from my setup experience
After you’re designated as a brand manager, it can take up to 24 hours before the permissions kick in. Also — and this cost me more time than I care to admit — the “Create” section where Brand Kits live is not in the main navigation of Microsoft 365. You have to go to m365.cloud.microsoft and look in the waffle menu. Once you find it, it makes sense. Getting there is the hard part.
Admin Setup: The Brand Manager Policy
To enable Brand Kit creation in your organization, an administrator needs to configure the Enterprise Brand Manager policy in the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center (config.office.com). The steps are:
- Create a mail-enabled security group containing the users who will be brand managers.
- Navigate to Customization → Policy Management in the Apps Admin Center and enable the Enterprise Brand Manager policy, scoping it to that security group.
- Brand managers in that group gain publish and edit access to official Brand Kits. All other users can access and use kits but cannot create or modify them.
There is also a separate “Restrict Brand Kit Creation” policy if you want even tighter governance — this locks down Brand Kit creation to the specified group while still allowing everyone else to consume the kits. See: Microsoft Learn: Set Up the Restrict Brand Kit Creation Policy.
The Guidelines Feature: Let Copilot Do the Work
One of the more interesting capabilities in M365 Copilot Brand Kits is the guidelines feature (See: Use guidelines to manage brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app). If you upload your existing brand guidelines as a PDF, Copilot will automatically extract:
- Color palettes
- Typography rules
- Brand voice and style guidance
- Logo and asset usage rules
This is genuinely useful. For an organization that already has a brand guide PDF but hasn’t translated it into M365 assets, this could significantly accelerate setup. The Sympraxis Brand Guidelines document is a perfect example of the kind of source material Copilot can process — it contains specific hex codes, color rules, and usage guidance that Copilot can parse and apply automatically.
Note on guidelines and existing assets
If your Brand Kit already has color palettes or brand voice settings, uploading a guidelines PDF will override those existing values. Add your manual assets (logos, fonts, templates, images) before or during the guidelines extraction — not after — to avoid overwriting work.
Part 3: How Do They Relate? (The Question I Started With)
My original question in the team chat was: “How does this mesh with Brand Center?” Having now dug into both, here’s how I’d summarize the relationship:
| SharePoint Brand Center | M365 Copilot Brand Kit | |
| Lives in | SharePoint (a special communications site) | M365 Copilot app (m365.cloud.microsoft → Create) |
| Managed via | SharePoint admin center | M365 Apps Admin Center (config.office.com) |
| Primary audience | SharePoint site owners and IT admins | Content creators, marketing teams, all M365 users |
| Controls | Site themes, colors, font packages for SharePoint intranet | Logos, colors, fonts, templates for Copilot-generated content |
| Applies to | SharePoint sites and Viva Connections/Teams app | PowerPoint, AI-generated presentations, images, documents |
| Governance model | Managed by SharePoint admin; Change the Look per site | Brand Manager Policy; Restrict creation policy for tighter control |
| Requires Copilot license? | No | Yes — requires Microsoft 365 Copilot Premium |
The short version: these are complementary, not competing. The Brand Center governs how SharePoint looks. The M365 Copilot Brand Kit governs what employees create with Copilot. An organization running Copilot at scale should ideally have both configured and aligned.
What they have in common is the need to be rooted in a real brand identity — which is why having a solid brand guide (like Sympraxis’s, with specific hex codes and clear usage rules) is the prerequisite for making either tool work well.
What to Do Next
Based on my research, here’s how I’d recommend approaching this for organizations using M365:
| # | Step | Notes |
| 1 | Get your brand assets organized | Before touching either M365 feature, make sure you have a current brand guide with specific color hex codes, approved logos in multiple formats, and any font files. This is your source of truth. |
| 2 | Set up the SharePoint Brand Center | Even if you’re not running Copilot, this is worth doing. It gives you centralized control over SharePoint site theming. Start simple — pick your primary brand color, verify accessibility, and apply it to key sites. |
| 3 | Check your font licensing before adding custom fonts | Contact whoever manages your font licenses. Confirm whether your corporate font carries a web and/or app license. If not, use Microsoft’s built-in font packages instead. |
| 4 | Create an M365 Copilot Brand Kit (if you have Copilot licenses) | Set up the Brand Manager Policy, add a small group of brand managers, and build your first kit. Reuse assets you’ve already organized. Try uploading your brand guidelines PDF and let Copilot extract the details. |
| 5 | Align both features to the same source | Use the same colors, logos, and brand voice in both the Brand Center and the Copilot Brand Kit. Consistency across both ensures that whether someone is creating a SharePoint page or generating a presentation with Copilot, it looks like your organization’s brand. |
Looking Ahead
The Ask Sympraxis team is covering the SharePoint Brand Center in depth on August 5th with Stefan Bauer — if you want to go deeper on the design and template side of this, that session is a great resource.
The bottom line: Microsoft is investing in making it easier to deploy and maintain consistent branding across the M365 platform. The tools are getting better. Taking a few hours to understand the landscape — and to actually configure what’s available — is time well spent.
p.s. Yes, Copilot helped me write this past, based on my conversations and notes in M365.