Create and manage meeting themes for Teams meetings

APPLIES TO: Meetings Webinars Town halls

Some features described in this article require Teams Premium.

Overview

Meeting themes include your organization’s brand colors, a custom image, logo, and branded meeting reactions.

As an admin, you can apply a custom theme to customize the visual appearance of a meeting, webinar, or town hall invite, pre-join screen, and lobby for your users' meetings. You can also create branded meeting reactions that participants use to express themselves. By incorporating your organization's brand elements (such as logos, mascots, and characters) or event-based visuals, custom branded reactions help personalize the user experience, fostering a sense of identity and engagement during meetings.

With the support of your brand management and corporate communications teams, you can easily set up and create meeting themes for various business units and departments within your organization. For webinars, organizers can also use the webinar registration page to configure the webinar's branding for registration and emails.

Only organizers with a Teams Premium license can create meetings, webinars, and town halls that include meeting themes. Anyone who joins these meetings and events can see the themes, including users in your organization without a Teams Premium license, guests, and anonymous users.

You can set up or manage meeting themes for Teams meetings, webinars, and town halls with the Teams admin center or PowerShell.

Prerequisites

Before you set up meeting themes in Teams meetings, make sure you have the following items:

• The users who need to use meeting themes have a Teams Premium license.
• You're an admin with access to the Teams admin center or you have an assigned customization policy.
• Your custom logo, image, color, and images for branded meeting reactions meet the upload requirements detailed in the following section.

Upload requirements

Meeting themes display the following visual assets for your theme:

• Logo - Your organization's logo that appears on key surfaces during meetings, webinars, and town halls, including the lobby screen.

• Custom image - A brand image from your organization (custom images aren't the same as custom meeting backgrounds).

• Custom color - We recommend using either your brand's primary or secondary color - whichever one best complements your brand image and logo.

• Branded meeting reactions - Branded reactions replace the default meeting reactions (Like, Heart, Applause, Laugh, Surprised) that participants use during a meeting. The images you upload replace the images in the default reactions. The following screenshots show the default meeting reactions and an example of custom meeting reactions.

  

  Use images that reflect your organization's brand identity, such as logos, icons, mascots, or characters, or event themes.

Logos

We recommend using a square icon style logo with minimal text and the dimensions of 800 x 800 pixels. The logos you upload must comply with Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1) and meet the following requirements:

• PNG and JPEG image formats.
• Two variations of the logo images that appear on the pre-join and lobby UI:
  • Dark theme brand logo
  • Light theme brand logo
• Maximum size of 5 MB.
• Minimum dimension of 576 x 576 pixels.
• You can upload one image per theme from your device.

Images

We recommend using images with the dimensions of 1,440 x 810 pixels. The custom images you upload must comply with Microsoft accessibility contrast ratios (4:5:1) and meet the following requirements:

• PNG and JPEG image formats.
• Two variations of the brand images that appear on the pre-join and lobby UI:
  • Dark theme brand image
  • Light theme brand image
• Maximum size of 5 MB.
• Dimensions:
  • Minimum dimensions: 1,024 x 574 pixels
  • Maximum dimensions: 3,840 x 2,160 pixels
• You can upload a minimum of 0 and a maximum of one image per theme from your device.

Images for branded meeting reactions

Custom reactions should be recognizable, inclusive, and representative of your organization's brand. As part of a themed package, reactions should follow a cohesive visual language. When creating your image sets, ensure that each reaction aligns with the reaction name (Like, Heart, Applause, Laugh, Surprised). For example, avoid using an unrelated image, such as a chair, to replace the default Laugh reaction.

Use these image guidelines for your branded meeting reactions. For each reaction that you want to customize, you must upload:

• A PNG file for the static reaction.
• A corresponding PNG image sprite for the animated reaction.

Static reaction

Upload one PNG file for each reaction you want to customize. This image is the base for the animated reaction. For best results, follow these guidelines:

• PNG image format with a transparent background
• Dimensions: 100 pixels x 100 pixels

Animated reaction

This is the image that animates when participants send a reaction during a meeting.

After you upload the static reaction, to enable animation, upload the corresponding PNG image sprite that contains all the keyframes of the animation.

For best results, create an image sprite according to the following specifications:

• The reaction should animate on the spot and needs to loop.
• The frame rate should be 24 frames per second.
• Each frame of the animation should be 100 pixels x 100 pixels.
• The animation frames are arranged in a PNG vertical sprite sheet with a transparent background.
• Dimensions: One column that's 100 pixels wide x 5,100 pixels high with no spacing between the frames.
• Number of frames: 51
  The animation uses 20 transition frames (10 frames for fade-in and 10 frames for fade-out). The key moment of the animation—such as thumbs up in the Like reaction—happens at frame 23.

Create or manage meeting themes in the Teams admin center

All Teams Premium licensed users are automatically assigned the global default policy. Any custom customization policies you create override the global default. You can upload a maximum of five themes to each policy. Adding multiple themes to each policy gives your organizers more options, allowing them to select the right branding for different meetings, webinars, and town halls.

To create or manage meeting themes, follow these steps.

Create a new customization policy or edit an existing policy

1. In the left navigation of the Teams admin center, expand Meetings, and then select Customization policies.
2. Select an existing policy or create a new one.
3. Within your chosen policy, go to the Customize meeting visuals section.
4. If you're creating a new policy, select Add a theme. If you're managing an existing policy, select Edit meeting themes to make changes to your theme.

Upload your logo, images, and set your custom color

1. In the Meeting themes pane:

   1. Under Logo, select the Upload logo buttons to upload a light and dark version of your logo. These square logos appear on key surfaces during the meeting or event, including the lobby screen.
   2. Under Images, select the Upload image buttons to upload a light and dark version of your custom image. Your organization's images are shown on the meetings or event screen and provide a colorful backdrop.
   3. Under Color, enter the hex code value of your organization's color, which displays on key surfaces of the meeting or event experience. To meet accessibility standards, the final color might differ from the color you enter.

2. Select Preview and then go to the Theming colors tab to see how your logo, images, and colors look on desktop.

Upload images for your branded meeting reactions

1. In the Meeting themes pane, under Custom reactions, select Upload next to the reaction you want to customize.

   

2. On the Static reaction tab, upload your PNG file, and then select Next.

   If you need to remove a custom uploaded image and return to the default reaction, select Revert next to the reaction.

3. On the Animated reaction tab, upload your corresponding PNG sprite file. You can download a sample sprite file to use as a reference. Select Save.

4. Select Preview, and then go to the Custom reactions tab to confirm your custom reaction appears as expected.

5. Repeat these steps for each reaction you want to customize.

Apply your theme and make it active

1. When you finish setting up your theme, select Apply to apply your changes.
2. On your theme's row in the Custom meeting visuals table, switch the Currently active toggle to On.

Assign the customization policy to users or groups

You can add up to five themes to a customization policy. After you add your themes, select Save to save your changes.

Then, assign the customization policy to specific users or groups in your organization. To learn more, see Assign policies to users and groups.

Allow organizers to turn off meeting themes for a meeting

You can give meeting and event organizers the option to turn off meeting themes for specific meetings, webinars, and town halls. When organizers turn off meeting themes, the meeting reverts to the default Teams theme.

To allow your meeting organizers to turn off meeting themes:

1. Go to the Meeting customization policy.
2. Switch the Allow organizer to control meeting theme toggle to On.

Meeting organizers can turn off meeting themes by:

1. Navigating to the Meeting options menu for a meeting.
2. Toggling the Meeting theme meeting option to Off.

Manage meeting themes in PowerShell

To upload images, you must use the Teams admin center. You can manage meeting themes by using the following PowerShell cmdlets in Teams PowerShell:

• Set-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy
• Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy
• New-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy

This example assigns a meeting theme policy called 'Policy Test' to a group named group@contoso.com.

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy -Group group@contoso.com -PolicyName "Policy Test" -Rank 1

This example assigns a meeting theme policy called 'Policy Test' to a user named alice@contoso.com.

Grant-CsTeamsMeetingBrandingPolicy -identity "alice@contoso.com" -PolicyName "Policy Test"

You can assign meeting customization policies to users or groups with a Teams Premium license in your organization.

Platform support

To view the list of platforms that support this feature, see Microsoft Teams Premium - Overview for admins.

Who can view a meeting theme

While only licensed users who are assigned a meeting customization policy can create meeting themes-enabled meetings and events, anyone can view the themes that are applied to a meeting, webinars, and town halls. These users include:

• Teams Premium licensed users in your organization
• Users in your organization that don't have a Teams Premium license
• Guests
• External Users
• Anonymous users

Best practices for meeting themes

• Use only your organization's official image assets. Don't use image content that you don't own.
• Work with your brand and marketing team to ensure that your image assets and colors together follow your organization's brand guidelines.
• Ensure you're using high-quality logo images, which are visible on small and large screen devices.
• Colors generated in Teams might differ from your brand colors. This process was created to ensure Microsoft Accessibility Standards are met.
• Users with high-contrast device settings can't see meeting themes.

Accessibility

Here are a few points to ensure accessibility requirements are met:

• Follow existing UI patterns and structure – The current structure and text on the screen aren’t being modified with this feature.
• Image Contrast Ratio – Image assets must meet the 4:5:1 color contrast ratio.
• Accessible color generation support – We calculate the accessible color output that is the closest match to the brand color input while maintain Microsoft Accessibility standards.
• High contrast support – For users with high contrast settings enabled, branding doesn't apply. They continue to see the default Teams meeting experience.
• Controls – You and your organizers can prevent users with accessibility concerns from seeing the branding through:
  • Policies – To ensure users with accessibility concerns don't create branding-enabled meetings, avoid assigning them a customization policy.
  • Meeting Options – Meeting organizers can turn off themes if a user with accessibility concerns joins their meeting or event.

Use cases for multiple departments or business units in one organization

Some organizations have multiple business units under different brand identities within the same organization. In these cases, you can create meeting customization policies that are dedicated to each brand. They can also assign a department or business unit user group to a specific policy.

Contoso Ltd. has a single organization in Microsoft Teams, with everyone in their organization's user profiles across different business organizations. The company is looking to adopt custom branded meetings in Teams to increase their brand presence with their clients and encourage an internal corporate culture.

Contoso has two business units (BUs) under their organization: Contoso Technical Services and Contoso Education. Both BUs have their own distinct brand imagery, and want to display their branding during their internal and external meetings.

To support this use case, Contoso's admins can create two distinct customization policies:

• Policy A - Contoso Technical Services – houses Contoso Technical Service’s brand logo, image, color, and custom reactions.
• Policy B - Contoso Education – houses Contoso Education’s brand logo, image, color, and custom reactions.

They can proceed to assign the licensed users in Contoso Technical Services to Policy A, and licensed users of Contoso Education to Policy B.

Related articles

• Teams Premium meetings customization options
• IT Admins- Manage and create custom meeting backgrounds for Teams meetings
• Overview of custom meeting templates in Microsoft Teams