Branding: Making the Platform Look Like Yours

Branding settings control how the platform looks, what things are called in it, and what people outside your organisation see when you share with them. They run from the obvious - a logo and a colour palette - through to your own typeface, the shape of every corner, and renaming assets to whatever your team actually calls them. This article covers what can be changed, which surfaces each change reaches, the order worth doing it in, and where the limits are.

Two Audiences, One Set of Settings

Branding is doing two different jobs at once. Internally, it decides whether the platform feels like part of your organisation or like a third-party system people have been told to use, which sounds cosmetic and is not: adoption is easier when a tool looks like it belongs beside the others your team opens every day.

Externally, it is doing commercial work. Portals and showcases go to clients, partners and press, and a recipient landing somewhere that looks like yours is receiving something from your organisation rather than downloading from a file host.

Both jobs run off one set of settings, which is worth remembering while you configure them: choices made for your own team's comfort are also the ones your clients see.

Logos, Favicons and the Login Screen

The image slots cover the places a logo is expected to appear, at the sizes each needs:

• Logo: the main mark, shown in the platform header.
• Small logo: a compact version, used where the full mark will not fit, such as narrow and mobile layouts.
• Favicon: the browser tab icon, generated in the formats browsers ask for.
• Favicon (dark): an alternative tab icon, so a mark designed for light backgrounds stays legible against dark browser chrome.
• Login background: a full-bleed image behind the sign-in form.

Alongside them sit the words: a site name, which appears in browser titles and on the login screen, an optional site description, and a separate title and description for the login screen itself. Uploads accept the usual web image formats and each is resized to fit its slot, so you can supply one good original rather than preparing five versions of it.

The login screen deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it is the surface you see least and other people see most. It is the first thing a new colleague meets, and what an external recipient reaches when signing in to a portal. A line saying which organisation this belongs to does more for confidence than the background image does.

Colour Is Set Explicitly, Not Derived

Colour is configured in two layers. The application palette covers what you see most: the grey scale the interface is built on, the primary colour across its full range of shades, a set of accent colours, the success and error states, and the opacity of overlays. Beneath it, a base palette governs surfaces, text, dividers, backgrounds and the standard semantic colours.

The important property is that every step is set individually rather than computed from one brand colour. Plenty of systems take a single hex value and generate a ramp from it, which is faster and reliably produces shades that are nearly, but not quite, the ones in your brand guideline. Here, if your guideline defines nine steps of grey and five of your primary, you enter nine and five.

In practice, start with the primary range and the greys. Those two carry most of the perceived change, and the base palette is there for when you need to go further than they reach.

One limit to note: the interface itself is a single light theme. The dark-mode favicon exists so your tab icon survives dark browser chrome, not as the entry point to a dark interface.

Your Own Typeface

You can upload the actual typeface your brand uses, in three weights - light, regular and bold - in the standard web font formats. A global scale adjusts overall text size, and individual text styles can have their size and line height overridden where a heading or a caption needs it.

Type is the element people notice without being able to name. A correct logo and a correct palette set in the wrong typeface still reads, unmistakably, as someone else's software, and fixing it is the change that most often makes people say the platform finally looks right.

Two cautions. Check that your licence covers web use before uploading, since a desktop licence frequently does not. And leave the per-style size overrides alone until the typeface and palette have settled - they are for correcting a specific problem, not for designing from.

Shape and Chrome

Corner rounding is set separately for four kinds of element: controls such as buttons and inputs, surfaces such as panels and cards, media such as thumbnails and previews, and the fully rounded shapes used for pills and badges. A brand built on square corners does not have to accept rounded ones, and a brand that rounds everything can go further than the default.

Layout chrome is adjustable too. The sidebar, top bar, filter bar and content area can each be presented as a card floating on a background or as a flat continuous surface. This makes a larger difference to the overall impression than a list of four toggles suggests - it is the difference between a layered interface and a calm one. The top navigation bar can also be hidden, for a simpler presentation where the platform sits inside a wider set of tools.

Renaming What Things Are Called

Every record type can be renamed, with singular and plural set independently, and the new wording flows through navigation and interface copy. If your team says "files" rather than assets, or "collections" rather than folders, the platform can say it too.

The list covers assets and subassets, portals and showcases along with showcase templates, accounts and their types, contacts and their roles, opportunities and their stages, leads and their statuses, comments, users and user groups.

This is a smaller feature than the colour palette and often a more valuable one. Terminology is where a platform quietly imposes itself: either your team learns a new vocabulary for things it already had names for, or the platform adopts yours. The second is less work, and it removes a small act of translation from every conversation and every support request.

Labels are one set for the workspace rather than per language, so choose the wording your organisation works in.

What External Recipients See

Portals inherit your workspace branding - logo, favicon, login background and colours - so recipients arrive somewhere that looks like your organisation rather than a generic download page.

What each portal sets for itself is the wording: a welcome title and description shown inside the portal, and a separate title and description on its sign-in screen. Workspace-wide defaults exist for all four, so every new portal starts with sensible copy rather than a blank space, and can be given something specific when it deserves it. The sign-in wording is the one worth writing, since explaining what someone is about to access and who sent it removes most of the hesitation around entering an email address.

Showcases go further, because presentation is their purpose: each template carries its own hero image and logo image, so a public gallery can be dressed for its own occasion rather than looking like the platform it came from.

Two boundaries are worth knowing. Portals follow the workspace palette and logo rather than carrying their own, so they will look like one organisation sharing with several audiences, not like several different brands. Emails use your site name, and their own email logo and colours set on the Email tab. Without an email logo they fall back to the site logo.

Branded Emails

Every email the platform sends, such as invitations and notifications, shares one design that you can brand on the Email tab. Upload an Email logo to show at the top of every email. This is worth doing if your main logo is light, since the site logo is used otherwise and can disappear against a coloured background. Set the Background Color, Button Color and Button Text Color, or leave a field empty to keep the default. The Preview beside the settings shows the result before you click Save. Emails also include a plain-text version for mail apps that don't show formatting.

Branding Inside the Library

Beyond the workspace chrome, several things can be given a visual identity where people are actually working:

• Folder banners: a banner across the top of a folder, holding one or more items with an image, text, a background colour and a link. Height and rotation interval are configurable, and a banner can be inherited by subfolders. This is the most effective place to put campaign guidance or usage rules, because it is in front of people at the moment they are choosing a file.
• Folder images: a picture for a folder, which turns a list of similar names into something recognisable at a glance.
• Asset type thumbnails: the placeholder shown for file types that have no visual preview of their own.
• Dashboard banners: the same idea applied to the landing page, for announcements people should see on arrival.

Getting a Coherent Result

The order matters more than the completeness:

• Do the logo, favicon, site name, primary range and greys first. That is a small amount of work and most of the visible change.
• Check the login screen and one real portal after every change. These are the surfaces you look at least and other people look at first, so they are where a mistake survives longest.
• Add the typeface once colour is settled, and resist per-style size adjustments until you have lived with it.
• Keep the values in your brand guideline, not only in the platform. Someone will need to reproduce them, and reading hex values back out of a settings screen is a poor substitute for a record.

The standard to aim at is not that the platform looks striking. It is that nobody mentions it, because nothing in it looks borrowed.

Who Can Change It

Branding is configured under Setup > Site Branding, across tabs for site branding, login branding, colours, email, typography, appearance and labels. Viewing the settings, changing them and uploading images are separately permissioned, and labels are controlled separately again, so the ability to adjust the palette does not have to come bundled with the ability to rename every record type. If you need branding changes and cannot reach the settings, contact your administrator or Data Dwell support.