Forum Discussion
SharePoint gear icon changes
Andy Tischaefer ...Could you please clarify the below points?
1. Is there any way to define a custom O365 theme or only options available are to choose from pre-defined ones that show up under the Settings gear or define the theme settings in O365 admin center under 'Custom theme for organisation'.
2. We have a custom background image uploaded in our tenant and the recent change has caused it to not work properly. New theme displays 'nav bar background colour' in left (app launcher) as well as right (user name and settings gear icons). The background image is added in the middle which means the whole top banner appears as three different parts: left (colored background), middle (background image) and right (colored background).
Regarding point 2, we tried some built-in themes e.g. the 'Beach Sunset' and noticed the background image displays seamlessly end-to-end from left to right. When I checked the HTML code, the difference is how background-color is applied. For the theme we set in admin center, a hex code is required for nav background color, whereas for 'Beach Sunset' background-color is set to rgba(221,115,125,.6). Hence, the theme we set in admin portal gets solid colored left and right sections whereas out-of-the-box ones get different treatment.
It's causing quite a bit of pain for us? I hope Microsoft designers can provide a way to fix this or at least provide the option to set colors in hex codes as well as rgba.
MicrosoftGurdev Singh thank you for your questions, I'm sorry to hear that you are having problems.
With regard to defining custom O365 themes, the only option provided today is the "Custom theme for organization". Can you elaborate on what you're looking for when you say you want to define a custom theme?
I'd like to know more about your custom background image issue. From my testing, behavior of admin-set custom background images before/after the modern header rollout didn't change from the old header to the new header. In both cases the custom image did not stretch to exist under the app launcher or the icons on the right side. If you're seeing something different, then we may be talking about different things here. One way to check, at least for a little while longer, is to load page that has your custom background image on Office.com or SharePoint, see how it looks, and then click on the user icon in the right corner of the header, select "My Account", and see what the background image looks like there. "My Account" are still running the old header code for the moment. If the background image acts differently in those two places, then that is a bug that I'd like to investigate, but I'm not seeing that in my own testing.
As to why custom images set by admins behavior differently than the background images provided as part of themes, I can assure you it has nothing to do with rgb vs hex values (the browser interprets those the same). This design predates my time on the team, but I believe the intent here is to ensure that the app launcher and icons are always visible - we can (and do) test the themes we ship, but we have no way to do that with custom uploaded images, so we restrict how far they are allowed to stretch. I will pass this feedback along to our design team to possibly reconsider this in the future.
In the meantime, can you clarify why setting custom theme information for your tenant, to a set of colors that is complimentary to the background image that you want to set, isn't an acceptable path forward? I'd like to know more.