With the constant changes of Office 365 for new features from Microsoft, branding in SharePoint online can become challenging. On top of that the official recommendation from Microsoft is to not use Custom Master Pages, Custom Site Templates or Sandboxed Solutions for Office 365 sites anymore.
Though Microsoft mentions no customizations, each corporation wants its own unique, consistent and repeated visual brand identity. The unique brand identity makes them stand out in the crowd. All my experience until now in SharePoint is that corporations want SharePoint to look like their custom, unique web portal. Microsoft is following a two week update schedule, hot fixes can be a surprise for brand implementers, for example Sweet Bar, App Launcher and so on.
The new Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 introduced a suite bar at the top of the screen. By default it displays a SharePoint or Office 365 Word at the left side and some links for the installed features at the right.
Office 365 has the ability to create a custom theme for Office 365 environments. But themes work in a selected area, not all areas of SharePoint online, as shown in some screen shots shown below.
Theme changed to:
![site setting]()
After the changes are applied, the areas not changed are:
- OneNote
![one note online]()
- The Ribbon is still Blue in the Documents Library:
![office 365]()
Yammer and Onedrive also have their own branding. So for any heavy custom branding (headers, footers, logos, customized notifications areas and custom web parts in a master page) SharePoint on premise should be used since things are going to change more often online (master page changes, script references, CSS changes, content placeholder changes, custom templates). There will be a continuous update cycle for maintaining SharePoint online to ensure a web site is not broken.