SharePoint 2013 branding: Using the Design Manager, or going old school

By Mark Watts

May 7, 2013 — (Page 1 of 4)
When news first started trickling out about the new Design Manager in SharePoint 2013, for most it generated more questions than answers. Would standard Web designers be able to brand for SharePoint now without any knowledge of SharePoint? For that matter, would end users be able to create SharePoint branding through a simple no-code interface? What did all this mean for the specialized SharePoint brander?

Now that SharePoint 2013 has been out in production for a little while, we have had a chance to kick the tires on the Design Manager and learn about what it can do and can’t do, what it’s really good at and where it falls short. Still, though, the question I hear time and time again when anyone starts a SharePoint 2013 branding project is, “Should I use the Design Manager, or can I do it the way I am used to with SharePoint 2010?” In this article, I will try to answer that question, and lay out the pros and cons of both choices.

In SharePoint 2010, the most popular way to do a SharePoint 2010 branding project was to download a starter master page (such as the one created by ) and create a design that was still fully functional in SharePoint. A separate style sheet to be used by the starter master page, any assets such as images or scripts would be uploaded to the Style Library and, if need be, custom page layouts were created. At this point, everything would be packaged as a solution in Visual Studio, and the .wsp would be deployed to the SharePoint farm.

Of course, for smaller branding projects, there were other valuable options such as themes, SharePoint Designer, and alternative CSS, but for any major branding project that would be used on multiple site collections, the starter master page method as described above became the de facto standard.

Using a starter master page
The good news in SharePoint 2013 is that, even with the Design Manager, you can still create a SharePoint 2013 design the same way you did in SharePoint 2010, and everything will function just the same. In fact, Randy Drisgill already has a . So if you are more comfortable with doing things the SharePoint 2010 way, then by all means continue to do so. You will still need to learn about the new branding techniques in SharePoint 2013 like composed looks, preview files, device channels and display templates, but you are by no means forced to create your SharePoint 2013 master pages from the Design Manager.

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SharePoint 2013 branding: Using the Design Manager, or going old school

By Mark Watts

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