Back at work after coughing up a lung and hey, check out SPDesigner

I'm back at work after a few days off (of course getting sick over the weekend is no fun). I thought my lungs were going to collapse on Friday so I headed home early and stayed in bed all weekend taking every concievable legal cough/cold remedy drug known to mankind. After 72 hours of wandering in and out of conciousness I think I'm pretty healed so back to the grind.

By way of Daniel McPherson and this blog I found a very cool new (beta) tool by James Milne called SharePoint Style Designer (or just SPDesigner or SPSkin depending on where you look). It's basically a simple way to create your CSS files (one for SPS, one for a custom theme in a WSS site). Rather than plodding through the CSS files yourself with something like Top Style (my choice of CSS tools), James tool just breaks the sections down and gives you what you need to configure. Very cool and very slick.

You can view the tool online here. You can tweak the values in each category and view the resulting CSS. You can even work your style online and submit it for future versions of the Style Designer. I can't seem to find a way to download it and use it locally but it's currently in beta and perhaps not available. In any case, check it out if you're looking to change the look and feel of your SharePoint installations.