SharePoint 2013 Branding - Best practice?

Question

What's best practice to apply branding on publishing sites and team sites in a SharePoint?

What I'm used to is making a custom solution in VS, but now you got the design manager and also have the option to apply branding by an App.

If make an app, is it possible to add pagelayouts, device channels , etc?

Answer 1

My personal take on this is stick to the custom VS solution.
The design manager is not something that I would recommend as there are some complications when you want to remove or change the design later.
The App solution is usable, but then why not just use the custom VS solution?

All in all it depends on the scale of the implementation and how to structure the solution.

Best practices are usually the following:

• Insert CSS files (in Masterpage) using Delegate Controls
• Reference Javascript files (in Masterpage) using Delegate Controls
• Provision masterpage and pagelayouts using Features with Receivers (both Site and Web scoped depending on the architecture)