Branding your company’s Teams meetings and calls with frosted glass effects

Microsoft Teams continues to innovate, and one of the latest features to enhance your meetings and calls is the frosted glass background effect. This feature allows you to brand your company’s Teams meetings and calls in a professional and visually appealing way. Every Teams user can manually upload individual frosted glass backgrounds. Teams Premium administrators can also upload frosted glass backgrounds for their organization and assign those backgrounds to different teams based on customization policies.

Here’s how you can make the most of this feature.

Transform transparent PNGs into frosted glass backgrounds

Teams turns any transparent PNG background image into a frosted glass background. This means you can use your company’s logo with a transparent background to create a branded and polished look for your Teams calls. The frosted glass effect adds a touch of elegance and ensures that your logo stands out.

Strategic logo placement

Transparent backgrounds give you flexibility in logo placement. You can position your logo anywhere on the transparent background, whether it’s in the center or in any corner, to enhance visibility. This allows you to customize the look and feel of your Teams calls to align with your company’s branding guidelines. You achieve this level of customization by changing where in your transparent PNG background you place your logo.

Professional and clean video appearance

You can also use an image without transparency to brand your meeting. Non-transparent backgrounds will fully replace your actual background. This may look a little jarring to the eye if the lighting conditions in the actual background differ significantly from the lighting conditions in the background replacement. The frosted glass by contrast creates a more natural look where the person and background share lighting conditions. This effect is reminiscent of the corner office with a frosted glass wall. To further enhance this effect, meeting participants can turn on the “adjust brightness” filter in Teams video settings. This ensures that your video appearance is always top-notch, regardless of your physical environment. This effect works across the platforms on which you may already be using Teams: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and the web.

Different branding styles for different teams

You can choose different frosted glass backgrounds for different teams within your organization. For example, the Sales team could have a different logo than the Service team or the Legal team. You control this by assigning different policies to different teams in the Teams Admin Center. This level of customization allows each team to have a unique identity while maintaining a cohesive overall brand. You could even embed messages like “attorney client privileged” in your Legal team’s frosted glass background.

Enforce specific background effects

To ensure consistency across all Teams calls, Teams admins can enforce the use of specific background effects by marking a background as required in the Teams Admin Center. This gives your Teams admin full control over how your company shows up both in internal and external Teams meetings and calls. By standardizing the background, you can maintain a professional and unified appearance for all your virtual meetings and calls.

Tips & Tricks

For best results when preparing the PNG image, please keep in mind:

• Resolution: Use 1920×1080 pixels for a high-quality background
• Avoid full opacity: Colored content such as logos looks best with a little transparency. We recommend 75% opacity
• Defocus the image: A Gaussian blur of radius 2 works well to simulate a bit of depth of field in the scene.
• Stencil mid-gray foreground: For grayscale PNG with transparency, we recommend having the full image in mid-gray (value 128) so that the transparency pattern is visible on both light and dark backgrounds.

Get started with Frosted Glass Backgrounds

To start using frosted glass backgrounds, follow the instructions on the Microsoft Teams support page for custom meeting backgrounds here. Teams Admins can deploy frosted glass and other backgrounds company wide. Individual users can manually upload transparent logos as backgrounds to achieve the frosted glass effect for their own meetings. Check with your IT admin about acquiring a Microsoft Teams Premium license. Try or buy Teams Premium today.