SharePoint 2013 Branding and User Interface Design

Foreword

I joined Microsoft at a time when the development of SharePoint 2013 was well underway. My first week there, I was told that I owned the Design Manager and Device Channel user experiences, which you’ll learn about in just a matter of pages. As quickly and thoroughly as possible, I had to ramp up on a set of features that would later be part of the keynote demos at SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas. My starting point was the previous version of this book, written for SharePoint 2010. But the world changed significantly between these releases, and the authors went along for that ride, becoming my friends along the way as we worked together to make designing websites on SharePoint a great experience all around.

SharePoint has a rich history as a document management tool, but branding was often an afterthought. Although it was possible to create beautiful SharePoint sites, it wasn’t a familiar process for designers. It was with this in mind that we created a new way to approach design in SharePoint Server 2013. We didn’t want you to have to make the trade-off between an easy, gorgeous design and a SharePoint site. Whether you’re a small business owner who can’t afford to hire a designer, or a large enterprise with the ability to hire an entire design team, SharePoint Server 2013 provides a number of site design capabilities to match every customer.

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