Great Workshop by Heather Solomon on SharePoint 2013 Master Page Branding. Really gave me something to think about in having only one Master Page per Farm. I had never really thought of content/layout pages as being able to override anything in the Master. Really Neat! (70s die hard).
Totally confirmed what I knew about SharePoint Design Manager and Cathy Dew alluded to in her Rocket City SharePoint meeting: it has no clue about how SharePoint Functions.
You start with an html page (totally unrelated to SharePoint) and you build a Master Page (also totally non-functional for a real world SharePoint Site.)
Then you can go into a god-awful snippet editor and extract code you wouldn’t give to your worst programmer enemy and ask the non-SharePoint designer to stick it somewhere to make Top Navigation or Search work. And this is the no-brainer part. (Most on the part of Microsoft.)
Also she confirmed that while “Composed Looks” are warm and fuzzy–deploying them with customized master pages to numerous sites make the space mission look trivial.
My recommendation is that if you need it–Get it.
Stephan
