Erin Naidu, Graphic Designer
I have to admit, as a Graphic Designer, I was probably the least excited of all about the new design features in the new SharePoint Modern. Although it always had some DIY design functionalities in the past, the new platform has now fully joined the likes of Website Builder products such as Wix and Squarespace and offers the average user the opportunity to have their very own, beautifully designed responsive websites all without the need of manual input. The days of forking out a small fortune on a design team are gone; seemingly pushing any graphic designers and developers to the sidelines. After looking through the SharePoint Modern Look Book and admiring the abundance of beautiful templates, I couldn’t help but wonder if I even had much of a purpose anymore.
SharePoint Modern ticks all of the boxes: it is responsive, easy to customise, has ready-made colour themes, a plethora of looks at your fingertips, and it offers all this at a fraction of the time and cost that you would have expected in the past. After flicking through the SharePoint Modern Look Book, you pick your favourite template, plug it into your SharePoint site and voila! You’ve got yourself a beautiful and powerful new intranet, with a set of colour themes to pick from as well as a carefully curated set of placeholder images to suit the template theme that you’ve chosen.
But what happens if you don’t want to use the colours provided to you and I’m sure you’re going to want to change the imagery. What a lot of us don’t realise after being dazzled by the templates in the Look Book, is that the snippets given to us are all meticulously designed so that the colours, content layout, images, everything all works together in harmony to create one beautiful example of a site. Upfront, we’re wowed by their elegance, but how come it doesn’t look the same once we’ve installed it and made some adjustments? After changing some colours, putting in our own images and moving a few web parts around, how is it somehow now flat, lifeless, and kind of odd? Instead, we’re left in a weird place where we have a site that has lost all the charm that it had originally, but it also doesn’t fully encapsulate our brand; the colours are close, but not the same and the images seem raw and messy. We’re left baffled and frustrated and it’s not until then that we start to realise that the templates aren’t entirely customisable. Yes, on a base level, we can add our logo, change the colours, and sure, we can change the images and web parts, but what else? What if I want different colours? Or to have them applied in different ways other than what the template allows? What if my images just don’t cut it?
Sure, there are plenty of opportunities to be able to customise these things yourself, but Graphic Designers still have a lot to offer; they have a unique edge in that, well, they’re trained in the psychology and theory of design. Consulting with a Graphic Designer during the design process of your site or even handing over the reins completely can allow you a greater chance at carving out a site with your very own unique identity. They would be able to provide you with advice on colours and imagery, and maybe even curate a library of specially selected stock imagery to come up with a look that is unique to you within the confines of the basic out of the box functionality of SharePoint Modern.
Another way that a Graphic Designer could help immensely without the use of any deeper customisations is by fully illustrating the site. The advantage that illustrations have over images is that they can communicate a theme, message, and brand all at once. One way to go about customising a SharePoint site without delving too deeply into the themes is to stick with a neutral theme, and then fully illustrating the site with customised illustrations. Anywhere that an image would go, use an illustration instead. To take things further, one could even have those illustrations animated, and then embed those videos into the pages of their sites through web parts. Apart from being an ever-popular trend, this would be an easy way to get your company’s corporate colours and message across without the need for a particularly SharePoint savvy graphic designer.
If however, you find yourself a Graphic Designer with some experience in doing deeper customisations within SharePoint Modern, you then open your site up to a world of design options. There will still be some restrictions, but that is to be expected with any website builder. However, instead of merely settling on a colour theme that is close enough to your corporate colour palette, you can instead bring your full colour scheme through as a customised theme.
Like with all website builders, there are definitely pros and cons; the pros are that websites are now easier to make and maintain and are now far cheaper to produce when you’re not having to pay for a graphic designer and a team of developers to create your site from scratch. The cons however, apart from the templates not being entirely editable, is that unless you have some design knowledge yourself, graphic designers - or at least some gentle words of advice from one - are still required to give your new site a little extra edge. A designer can help your site go from something that looks mismatched and unfinished to a complete and polished piece of work, all with a nothing more than a little skill and design know-how. This would still however only be a fraction of the time and cost of creating a site manually, and you would still have the benefit of being able to maintain the site yourself after it has been created. Sure, you can do a lot of the modifications yourself but due to design constraints within the template, it’s likely that you’ll end up with something that is merely an echo of your corporate image; but then, since when is close-enough good enough? At the end of the day, what it all really comes down to is that if you’re investing anything into a site to call your own, wouldn’t you want to ensure that it’s perfect?
Insight: Website Builders may allow for you to create websites without the need for code, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate Graphic Designers and their valuable role in your design project.
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