SharePoint is getting a refreshed look and feel designed to make the product feel simpler, clearer, and more focused on your content. We’ve recently introduced a new SharePoint experience, organized around helping you discover knowledge, publish content, and build solutions. Along with that new experience, we’re introducing visual updates across key product surfaces that reduce visual noise, improve readability, and bring more consistency to the interface while preserving the branding investments your organization has already made. We call this work the SharePoint visual refresh: a thoughtful update to the product’s visual language that helps SharePoint feel more modern, approachable, and easier to use.
Background
Over time, SharePoint’s capabilities have continued to grow, which has given us an opportunity to update the look and feel as well. These updates not only make the SharePoint UI fresh, but it ensures that we are consistent across M365.
The SharePoint visual refresh, rolling out to general availability now, is part of a broader collaborative effort across Microsoft 365 to modernize the suite and improve usability with this bold, new visual design, while also responding to customer feedback about visual clutter and the need for clearer focus on content. These updates are grounded in core design principles that prioritize usability, coherence, and a sense of delight in everyday interactions. This bold, new design is part of a larger update across many apps (such as Microsoft 365 Copilot) and platforms that family together to create a cohesive, modern look and feel.
Goals
The Visual Refresh is guided by several key goals:
- Deliver a more contemporary, polished look aligned with the broader Microsoft 365 experience to existing and new SharePoint experiences
- Improve consistency, usability, and accessibility across key SharePoint surfaces, including Sites, Pages, and Document Libraries and the new Discover, Publish, Build destinations.
- Reduce visual clutter to improve focus on what matters most: your content
- Create a design system that scales, from simple team sites to complex enterprise scenarios
Consistency Across Experiences
Once adopted, the visual refresh will strengthen alignment between SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and the Microsoft 365 shell, reducing visual fragmentation across navigation, pages, and components.
By aligning how our UI looks and our theming approaches, we aim to create a more predictable experience for users moving between tools and surfaces, helping avoid visual dissonance and reducing cognitive load across day‑to‑day workflows.
What’s being updated
- Canvas elevation: putting content in the spotlight
One of the most noticeable changes is the elevation of the SharePoint site canvas. By adding a subtle shadow, refined spacing, and a light gray shade to backgrounds, the refreshed design helps your content stand out, making it easier to scan, read, and interact with pages.
Importantly, this is not achieved by changing your content. Instead, the improvements come from thoughtful adjustments to padding, layout spacing, and visual framing, ensuring that the emphasis remains on the information you create and manage. This does not effect existing layouts or how sites reflow.
Page view before / after Visual Refresh
- Neutral theming for app surfaces
We’re also evolving how themes are applied within SharePoint to improve consistency, accessibility, and clarity across experiences by separating the core SharePoint user interface from customer content. Updated neutral theming of app surfaces provides a more stable visual foundation and establishes a unified set of navigational UI, where the customer brand remains in an anchor position and is in harmony with the new neutral navigation. This approach allows customer branding to be expressed more clearly without competing with structural UI elements, clarifies the distinction between customer branding and the SharePoint app, reduces visual competition, and improves focus on primary content.
Previously, surfaces were a mix of SharePoint and Customer theming; simplifying how surfaces are themed improves clarity and reduces visual noise, improving usability.
- Styling updates
Additional updates to typography, spacing, and corner rounding introduce a more cohesive and contemporary visual language across SharePoint surfaces. Updated typography and spacing enhance readability and create more consistent rhythm across pages and components, making information easier to scan and interact with. At the same time, increasing corner radius of the UI makes it feel more approachable, and through a flexible system brings greater consistency to our products, helping related components feel more integrated and visually connected. Together, these refinements simplify the overall interface, reduce unnecessary visual noise, and contribute to a lighter, more modern experience that aligns more closely with the broader Microsoft 365 design ecosystem.
Increasing roundedness of UI improves the approachability and overall product aesthetics; on the right are examples of how the rounded corners may appear on a page with a group of cards.
What’s Not Changing
While the visual refresh introduces meaningful visual improvements, core SharePoint concepts and workflows remain familiar.
- Your content, structure, and brand are preserved
- Existing site architecture remains unchanged
- Day‑to‑day workflows continue to work unchanged
- There is no impact on existing SPFx extensions or solutions with this change
This update focuses on evolution, not reinvention, so users can benefit from improved clarity and modern visuals while familiar work flows and patterns remain the same.
Evaluated with Research
Across our research studies, participants consistently favored the Visual Refresh due to the cleaner and more contemporary look and improved labeling and structure.
- A calmer, more modern UI that’s easier to scan. Elevation + neutral theming made the page feel cleaner and it is easier to focus on the content.
- Clearer actions in the command bar. Stronger affordances (like button outlines) make common tasks - edit, undo, save, share - more obvious and easier complete workflows.
- Less guesswork when navigating. Icons and labelling in the app bar reduced friction and participants spent less time hovering and interpreting icons, especially those less familiar with SharePoint.
Overall, the Visual Refresh provides users with a new look they prefer without slowing down their workflow.
Looking Ahead
The SharePoint Visual Refresh is part of an ongoing journey. We’ll continue refining the experience, learning from customer feedback provided directly in-product, and shipping improvements incrementally, so SharePoint keeps getting better without disrupting how people work.
Familiar workflows will remain in place, now enhanced by improved clarity, consistency, and a more modern feel. We welcome all feedback!
See this post for more information about SharePoint’s exciting next chapter.
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