Easy-to-change Title Logo

A pretty simple tip, actually, but also a bit on the quick-and-dirty side. I wouldn't be recommending this as the first choice or common prosedure in branding SharePoint. But this works neatly enough in a project where the goal is to make as few customizations as possible and keep the focus on using SharePoint as much out of the box as possible.

Lets say we have a corporation with a MOSS intranet. They make a custom MasterPage with minimal changes, maybe none at all. They make a custom CSS page with corporate brand colors and fonts. They want the corporate logo to be visible on any and every page. But they want to leave it open for companies within the corporation to change the logo into their own one.

You can always insert the logo in a custom made spot of the master page, probably controlled by the CSS file. But if the logo is pratically the only thing each company needs to change on their own sites, a flexible way to make it possible is to use the Title Graphic sharepoint control.

On the MasterPage, you will see, that the default logo is referred to with a pseudo-url "_layout/images/titlegraphic.gif". There is no such diectory for real, instaed this refers to a directory in the SharePoint "hive": C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES, in which the titlegraphic.gif can be found. Copy the company logo to this directory, rename the original titlegraphic.gif (e.g. titlegraphic_orig.gif), then rename your company logo as titlegraphic.gif.

Now each and every site on the server farm should have the company logo in the place of the former titlegraphic. This will not break the dynamicity of the control and each company can easily substitute this logo with their own simply in Site Settings.

Note, that since the replacement was done in the HIVE, this really goes through each and every site collection that uses the default master! Also, this might be overriden with updates - just like potentially every change made in the hive.