Lesson 1: It is easy to create a variety of looks using the out of the box (OOTB) options available, but none of them made me do a double take
The instant I saw the white, blue and blah default Office Template look I knew I had to change it. I headed over to “Cog Icon > Site Settings > Change the look” to see what my options were and I was surprised to see some playful themes. The first look I choose was “Sea Monster” because…well…it has monsters in the name, need I say more? The look was great for a day but then I found it distracting from the tasks I was trying to complete. So, I nixed it and spent quite a bit of time playing with the all of the looks. I spent hours trying multiple combinations of designs, palettes, fonts and MasterPages.It was time to stop playing around with combinations and create my own theme.Lesson 2: When changing the background image of a Composed Look go with a larger image that does not need to be repeated
I headed back over to “Cog Icon > Site Settings > Change the Look” and selected the “Immerse” as my starting point. The first thing I did was change the background image to my own that needed to be repeated. I was 99% certain that a repeating image would not work, but I thought I would try it out and…yeah, it didn’t work. Instead the image was stretched to fill the viewport at 100%. Sure, you could override the CSS attributes which would allow the image to repeat, but instead I went the no CSS route and switched my background to a much larger one that would fill the viewport nicely without looking pixelated. Now I needed to decide on my remaining three options: colour scheme, font scheme and site layout. Each of these three components play an important role for the individual wanting to customize their SharePoint 2013 design. I will be covering these elements a bit later in their own post since it is a pretty large topic. After trying a few combinations I decided on the following mixture that I think looks pretty good: – The black, white and olive green palette – Belltown Site Layout (aka MasterPage) – Segoe UI Light/Segoe UI fontsLesson 3: Save your customized look in the Composed Looks list or you might lose all your hard work
The next step was to save my new look so I could apply it again later. I plan on playing with other looks which means I will lose these settings if I do not save them first. I was determined to see if I could do it simply through the interface and I was somewhat successful. How did I do it? Well let me show you:Step 1: Select “Cog icon > Site Settings” and click the “Composed Looks” link under the “Web Designer Galleries” heading


Step 3: The view will change to resemble an excel spreadsheet. Scroll to the bottom and copy the values that are stored under “Current”, give it a unique name and determine its sort oder (I made mine 1 so it would appear at the top of the first page)


Parting Thoughts
The Good- Overall I like the new design with its emphasis on typography as a design element
- The introduction of some fun new built in looks is a refreshing change from a product that has a bit of a stuffy persona
- You can achieve a simple level of branding with no HTML skills by creating a large background image and using one of the predefined colour schemes, font schemes and site layouts
- Inability to easily create your own colour schemes without editing an XML file
- Team sub sites do not automatically inherit the looks created in the root level Composed Looks list
- Being forced to use a a large image that is scaled to the browser window