“Modern” SharePoint has been around for years, yet most intranets still look dated. The pages are modern; the design is not. Making SharePoint look genuinely good is less about adding things and more about a few deliberate choices, applied consistently.
Theming beyond the logo swap
A real theme is more than a brand colour. It is a considered palette where the primary, the accents and the neutrals work together, with enough contrast to pass accessibility checks. SharePoint’s theme generator gives you a starting point, but the defaults are rarely the strongest version of your brand. Spend time on the palette; it touches every page.
Pay particular attention to contrast. A brand colour that looks great on a slide can fail WCAG AA as a link or button colour. If you cannot read it comfortably, neither can a chunk of your audience.
Typography and spacing
SharePoint gives you limited typographic control natively, but the choices you do have matter. Consistent heading hierarchy, generous spacing, and not cramming every web part above the fold do more for “modern” than any single feature. The dated look usually comes from density and inconsistency, not from the platform itself.
Restraint beats features
The fastest way to make an intranet look amateur is to use every web part on every page. A modern page has a clear purpose, a strong hero, and a small number of well-chosen components with room to breathe. If a page is trying to do five jobs, it does none of them well.
Where native runs out
There is a ceiling to what native settings reach: the grey header, the lack of custom typography in key places, and the difficulty of a truly consistent look across many sites. That is where supported SPFx components come in, for the header, theming and reusable branded parts. We cover the header specifically in what’s actually possible with the SharePoint header.
If you want the finished result without the trial and error, a bespoke intranet build is the craft we do, and the SharePointKit Theme web part handles the theming and accessibility checks for teams who want to do it themselves.