You may be familiar with the option to include an ‘Organisational Library’ option when adding an image to SharePoint. This option has allowed you to centrally store official company images for colleagues and ‘Content Authors’ to use when adding an image to SharePoint. Microsoft are about to take this one step further with the introduction of ‘Brand Centre’.
The SharePoint Brand Centre offers a centralised branding management application that empowers your Content Authors to help your organisation to customise the look and feel of their SharePoint Sites and Pages.
With this new brand asset management system, you can handle your colours, fonts, and images, and other assets all in one place.
What is the Brand Centre?
The Brand Centre uses the SharePoint Organisation Asset Library (OAL) to store and manage assets in the background. The Brand Centre app is located in a designated site within your tenant, typically the Hub Site (Home).
The SharePoint Brand Centre provides a central platform for brand management, allowing your content authors the freedom to personalise their department sites and pages, within the organisational branding guidelines.
This brand asset management tool enables the modulation of colours, typography, imagery, and various other brand elements from a unified location.
Brand Assets
Every organisation possesses brand assets critical to its brand identity. These are the distinctive elements like logos, colours, fonts, images, voice, and guidelines that form the company's look and feel.
Utilising these across various customer touch-points, such as websites, social media, and marketing materials, is key to establishing a memorable, trustworthy, and unique brand presence.
The main challenge in managing brand assets lies in maintaining consistency and quality on numerous platforms without excessive time and effort. The SharePoint brand centre simplifies this process within the Microsoft 365 suite, providing centralised asset management while allowing tailored usage across Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and other products.
Brand Fonts
A font isn't just a way of writing. It's a visual feature that connects your content to your brand and expresses your tone and character. A font can give your content a professional, creative, friendly, or authoritative appearance, depending on the typeface, size, colour, and spacing you use.
Within SharePoint and Viva Connections environments, an organisation can use the SharePoint Brand Centre to manage its fonts. This ensures consistency in font choices, aligning them with the company's branding and standards.
Microsoft Provided Fonts
Microsoft provides a set of fonts for usage in Microsoft 365 applications. A Microsoft 365 application can use the fonts to render content to a screen, allow that content to be edited, and allow that content to be output to a device, like a printer.
Some of the fonts supplied with the Brand Centre were created specifically for Microsoft by leading type designers and type design companies (known as font foundries). Other fonts were licensed to Microsoft from font foundries for inclusion with Microsoft 365 applications.
Microsoft provided fonts are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers.
Custom Brand Fonts
For fonts obtained elsewhere or supplied with other apps, you'll need to review the license agreements that accompany those applications.
Why Must I Dig Up and Read Those Agreements?
Microsoft can’t provide guidance to fonts that they didn’t supply.
The rights Microsoft provide you for Windows supplied fonts are considered quite broad, and it’s possible that other font licenses, even some free ones, may be more restrictive.
Some font foundries may give away “free” versions of fonts with limited licenses and make their money selling extended rights.
Some font licenses may restrict commercial use, require attribution, and restrict redistribution or commercial redistribution of documents that include embedded versions of the font.
How Can I Start to Use the Brand Centre?
To enable the SharePoint Brand Centre, the Global Administrator needs to perform a few simple steps in the Microsoft 365 admin centre to create/activate the Brand centre app.
Further details on the configuration of the Brand Centre can be found here.