UX & IA Design Thinking

After 6 months of hard work my SharePoint 2010 Branding Book: Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization   is finally available for order from Amazon !!! If you are quick and order now, you can get it under your tree by tomorrow! This book is a great deal as it comes with 2 pre-built visual designs , a visual studio solution for applying the designs, and of course a great resource book to help you on your branding journey. The two Visual designs included in the SharePoint Branding Kit : Many thanks to Chris Arella, Matt Lally, Robert Dornbush, and the team at Apress. This would not be at all possible without the support from my family and friends! Happy Holidays!

Have you ever wondered what are the major font types, sizes, colors, and images for SharePoint 2010? This post will cover some of the major statistics that are related to SharePoint Branding. This post originally spawned the topic of why SharePoint uses PT’s for font sizes when PX or EM’s are much better. Kyle Schaeffer created a very nice post about why you should use one format over the other: http://kyleschaeffer.com/best-practices/css-font-size-em-vs-px-vs-pt-vs/ . Over 75% of all font sizes declared in the standard SharePoint 2010 base style sheets use a font-size in Points. Example: font-size:8pt; Below are some other interesting statistics when it comes to other SharePoint 2010 support file statistics. Server Side Files: Not surprisingly there are a lot of images that are used to make SharePoint look the way that it does. The number would be slightly larger if the sprite images were broken out. There a ton of CSS files and what surprised me most is the amount of uni...

I wanted to share that my SharePoint 2010 Branding & Customization book is available for pre-order. You can click on this LINK to review and order my book. Or you can click on the link within the “My SharePoint Branding Book” element on the right side of My Blog . The book will be available December 15th 2011 and will include many great branding and design topics. Book Details: With Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization, SharePoint branding expert Erik Swenson cuts through the fluff and discusses accessible, easy-to-understand consulting and processes to create aesthetically pleasing, highly usable branded and customized SharePoint websites, both internally and externally. Designed to be a quick reference, how-to guide that lets you dive straight into the task at hand, you'll find this book's attention to detail and pragmatism make it an attractive companion during your branding experience. SharePoint 2010 deployments are more common than ever, ...

I was living in the stone age and now finally got around to getting a twitter account. Follow me @ErikJSwenson

Whoa, its been 3 months and no blog posts what gives??? Well I have been very very busy writing my SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization book!!! I am sorry about no posts lately but I am very excited to say that I am halfway through the book. It has been many of long nights but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The book is schedule to be published and available around the early part of December of this year 2011. So that will be just in time to order one for a great stocking stuffer! Here is a simplified TOC from the book. Introduction to SharePoint 2010 Branding Overview of UX/Branding Process Gathering Branding Requirements Creating the Visual Design Development Environment Setup Building the Design Testing the Visual Build Tips and Tricks Tools and Resources CSS Reference Guide I want to thank everyone who has continued to follow my blog, and has posted such great comments and questions. I promise that once this book is...

Update: Quick fix at the bottom of this post. Here is a SharePoint 2010 Bug that needs to be fixed. If you have a custom design and you moved the site actions out and below the Ribbon Control, you will notice that when you go to change a publishing page layout via the ribbon the option is disabled. Here is what the SharePoint 2010 publishing site Ribbon Page Layout Chooser looks like when active: If you move the Site Action Control <SharePoint:SiteActions out and below the Ribbon Control <SharePoint:SPRibbon something similar to this: And then edit the page and try to change the publishing page layout you will notice that some of the ribbon buttons are now disabled. The key issue here is that the site actions control is removed from the SPRibbon control and placed BELOW it. If you move it out of the ribbon control and above it it seems to work fine. Thanks to my friend Chris Arella he was able to figure out why this was happening. A big thank you to Ju...

If you want to allow your users to view/update their personal Status on any page in SharePoint 2010 follow these simple steps. 1.) As with my previous post you need to add the following to the top of your custom master page right before the doctype: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> 2.) In your custom master page search for “s4-trc-container-menu” and add in the following before the “Welcome” control: <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader runat="server" /> <SPSWC:StatusNotesControl runat="server"/> <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server"/> **Note that if you do not have the <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader runat="server" /...

Here is a simple way to add in the logged in users profile picture right before or after the users name in the SharePoint 2010 ribbon. 1.) Add the following to the top of your custom master page right before the doctype: <%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %> 2.) Add in the following control right before the welcome text: <SPSWC:ProfilePropertyImage PropertyName="PictureUrl" style="float: left; height: 20px;" ShowPlaceholder="true" id="PictureUrlImage" runat="server"/> A nice feature that you can customize is if you don’t want to show a placeholder image if a users has not uploaded a custom picture you can simply change ShowPlaceholder="true" to “false”. and it will only show a picture if someone has specified a cus...