Last Saturday I presented on SharePoint 2010 Branding at Richmond Code Camp. Since I went to the trouble of putting together a slide deck and a demo, I thought I would go ahead and share it on our blogs. The objective is to simply share my experiences with branding a publishing site template in SharePoint 2010. Hopefully you'll learn something from my post, and benefit from my explorations into making SharePoint look... well, less like SharePoint. ;)

I'll attach my slide deck for your reference, so feel free to download and read later. I'll not go into any of the slides, but instead jump right into my demo.

Branding Overview

Today I am going to give a high level overview of branding SharePoint 2007.  First, I will give a short description of each of the core elements of a SharePoint brand, and then I will briefly outline how to create a consistent brand across a SharePoint website. 

Custom branding SharePoint is an undertaking that will require significant time and resources to plan, design, develop, and implement.  For our purposes, a basic/core SharePoint brand is composed of Master Pages, Layout Pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Item Styles, Themes, and Features.  Several factors including the website’s scope, best practices, amount of customization required, and maintainability should be considered when planning how best to design and implement a SharePoint brand.  Below is a brief explanation of each part of a SharePoint brand:

• The Master Page is a container