Keep the Default Accent Color or Choose New One

I thought that life was complete when Teams delivered multiple emoji reactions for messages. Now I know I was mistaken because MC1115312 (14 July 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item Microsoft 365 roadmap item 497139) announces the arrival of customizable accent colors, which begin to roll out for Teams desktop and browser (but not mobile) clients in late July 2025. Worldwide deployment is scheduled to be complete by the end of August 2025.

I’m unsure of quite how many people have ever woken up saying how nice it would be if Teams supported a selectable accent color – or how many people understand the purpose of an accent color. Mozilla documentation explains that an accent color is a cascading style sheet (CSS) property that sets the color of certain user interface controls.

Selecting a Theme Accent Color

Given that the Teams UX is basically a big browser app, it doesn’t come as a surprise that a style sheet property is involved, but what does it do? Well, users can select a color from a set presented in the Appearance section of the Settings app (Figure 1). According to Microsoft, this is a “visual customization” of the Teams interface that “enhances the user experience.”

The ten colors in the set range from the default (a wishy-washy light blue) to Red to Teal to Pink to Grey. You can’t add extra colors, so Teams can’t comply with expensive corporate brandings that feature an exact shade defined in a Pantone code. There is no administrative control available to set an accent color for users or to disable the option to select an accent color. Choosing an accent color is a purely cosmetic change that is user-driven to reflect personal rather than corporate choice.

You might scoff about the need to respect corporate branding, but I remember a heated debate inside Digital Equipment Corporation when a new CEO decided to refresh the iconic logo with new colors. Cue a surprisingly vicious fight between people who liked different shades of burgundy…

How Teams Uses an Accent Color

When you select a new accent color, Teams uses that color for many different elements in its user interface. The best example I could come up with is from the new threaded layout for channels where the accent color is used to highlight the base topic for a thread. I chose Red as my account color, and you can see the effect in Figure 2. Other elements that use the color include the count of notifications at the top of the screen, hyperlinks, and the display names of conversation participants.

After selecting such a bold color, you can appreciate why the Teams developers chose a muted color as the default (the first color in the list of available accent colors). Figure 3 shows an even more garish appearance using a yellow accent. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you might consider this to be just the kind of thing you want to see when browsing conversations.

Teams uses the chosen accent color in both home and host tenants, so if you’re a guest member of teams in other tenants, your selected color shows up there too. However, the color choice is specific to a workstation, and if you use Teams on another device, you’ll get whatever color is selected there.

One oddity I noticed is that selecting a color in Teams affects the display of other applications. For example, this blog is hosted by WordPress, and the Jetpack stats view (of page views, etc.) changed its color when I selected a new color in Teams. This might just be coincidence, but that’s less likely when the same thing happens on two PCs.

Customization is Good

I don’t think anyone can argue that the provision of options to allow users to customize their working environment is a bad thing. However, sometimes I wonder why effort is expended on developments like selectable accent colors when so much else could be done to address other issues.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.