RJB Technical Sharepoint 2010 Blog

SharePoint Designer 2010 provides the best method for modifying MySites in SharePoint 2010.   It can be used to create customer master pages to drive the structure of the site.

The ability to modify sharepoint sites including MySites though in SharePoint 2010 will come down to CSS in 2010.  That's it.  Master pages leverage the CSS for all the branding because Microsoft has removed most of the inline styles that you maybe accustomed to in previous versions of SharePoint.

SharePoint Design 2010 will be required.  Microsoft says that it will continue to be free in 2010.  SharePoint Designer 2007 can NOT be used to modify SharePoint 2010 sites.

Sprites are also used inside of 2010.  This is probably the biggest branding related improvement when going from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.  A CSS Sprite is essentially a file that you can stick all of the images used in your site into which get loaded one time by the server and client.  This significantly reduces the number of times that you will need to go back to the server to load the images which will have big performance benefits for your SharePoint 2010 server.

Another major customization related change that will impact your MySite cuistomization efforts is that the html tables are gone from your *.master pages.  They now use DIV tags almost exclusively throughout SharePoint 2010.

Happy Branding!