I had the unfortunate honor of presenting to our Business Analysts the new SharePoint 2010. From the UI perspective, they thought the out-of-the-box themes were very ugly and unattractive. (Worse than wss3 with they also thought were poor quality.) To be honest I agree with them. The existing themes need to be reconsidered by a graphic artist. What do you think? TIA, Barkingdog

You may want to repost this in the SharePoint 2010 forums... http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010general/threads As far as rebranding, it's a common thing to do, and only limited by your budget. I think Word is ugly too, but I have not rebranded it. :-) You have many branding options, from books and consultants, to ready to purchase and download from the web. Mike Smith TechTrainingNotes.blogspot.com

Have to agree with Mike, they may not be the best of designs, but remember SharePoint is more of a platform. These are meant to be there as starting blocks for you to build and adapt on. MS could easily throw money at Graphic Designers to address the issue, but then that would only increase the end price and it would be overidding by each end client anyway due to their own branding requirements.Paul Turner http://redmanta.co.uk/blog Twitter: @RedMantaUK MCTS:WSS,MOSS,2010 MCITP:2010. Please remember to click "Propose As Answer" if a post solves your problem or "Vote As Helpful" if it was useful.

Paul, That is a good response. Thanks. I guess we are a small shop that uses tools but won't take the time to customize them from the UI perspective. (That means we won't customize the screens so ugly, plain, screens will remain ugly and plain.) BD