This Valentine’s Day we’ve decided to show our love. Not to our spouses or partners – sorry guys and gals, but we really don’t think you’ll miss our grand romantic gestures (read: coming home with kinder surprise eggs and blue carnations because all of the Valentine’s day stuff was sold out at the gas station on the way home). No, instead we’re showing our love to our CRM with a customized Valentine’s Day makeover.
Introduced in CRM 2016 On-Premise and CRM Online 2015 Update 1, adding your company logo and customizing your CRM theme are great ways to align your interface with your brand. Or, in this case, to have a little bit of fun!
In this blog post we’ll give you step by step instructions for each of these customizations. Follow along and show your CRM a bit of love with a new logo and a lovely pink color palette. Or, if you’re not in the Valentine’s Day spirit, you can go with something a bit different . . .
This One’s for You, Catapult CRM
Cupid, draw back your bow…
First things first, we wanted to spice up our CRM with this Valentine’s Day themed Catapult logo.
Because all you need is love. And Catapult, of course!
How to Change the Logo in Dynamics CRM
Note: With these steps you will create theme from scratch with a customized logo. If you want to keep the default CRM theme the best thing to do is to clone the default theme, rename it and add the logo (as in steps 4 and 5).
1. Click on ≡ in the menu bar. Then select Settings > Customizations
2. Select Themes
3. Click on + New (in the command bar) and give your theme a name (We’ve named ours “La Vie en Rose”)
4. Select the logo field and click “New.” Provide a name and select a file to upload or add a url for the web resource. Note: The optimal dimensions for a logo is 400 pixels wide x 50 pixels high.
5. Click Save and presto, you’ve got a logo!
6. If you want to change the navigation bar so that that it’s colour matches that of the logo, go back to the theme settings and change the Navigation Bar Color to the correct hex code. For more information on this process check out this blog post.
Amazing or what?
La Vie en Rose
We debated what color scheme to go for. Lovers in Japan, My Valentine 2017 or Lovely Rose? Eventually we settled on Days of Love.
How to Customize the Theme in Dynamics CRM
1. You’ve already created a custom theme in order to add a new logo. Click on the menu (≡) > Settings, Customizations > Themes. Then select the theme you would like to edit.
2. As you can see, the colors for each element have defaulted to black. Change the hex code for each element to get the desired color. In our example, the Navigation Bar Color is #ffbbca.
An explanation of each element and the color we used can be found in the table below.
3. After selecting your desired colors press Preview.
4. If you are happy with how things look select Publish Theme
5. Cue the music!
Note: Unfortunately, not everything can be customized. Firstly, there is no supported way to change the navigation tile colors. The Sales tile is still blue and the Marketing tile is still orange, for example.
Everything I do, I do it for UX Design
If you’re designing your own theme there are few best practices to keep in mind. Carefully consider the colors you want to use. Choose colors with the correct contrast ratios. If you pick colors such as this and this, you might make your users’ viewing experience just a little bit unpleasant. Also consider that the color of the icons themselves cannot be customized. So, for elements with icons (such as the entities – “Default Entity Color”), a color which allows those icons to shine.
Also, think about the number of colors you want to use. While our La Vie En Rose theme is very, very, pink – it only uses three different shades. This helps keep things simple. One good way to keep the number of colors you use down is to use the same color for similar or related elements.
A few things to “Truly, Madly, Deeply” consider
When customizing your theme there are a few important things to remember. Firstly, it’s not a one stop shop when it comes to applying the updated theme across environments. You either need to go through the above process in each environment or import/export the theme via excel. Secondly, these changes will not apply to mobile apps, the Outlook Client or the Outlook Web App.
