Digital Presence Style Guide
The college website adheres to certain branding guidelines. This style guide is intended to help campus divisions align their digital communications with the college’s official digital brand.
Using a similar yet not identical “look and feel” to that of davidson.edu can help strengthen credibility of your digital platform because students, prospective students and others can more easily identify your digital platform as an official source of information.
We provide basic style and other digital-related guidelines. For questions or more discussion on your digital needs, please email digitalstaff@davidson.edu.
Usability Requirements
College created and owned digital platforms must be accessible and should be responsive.
- Accessible: The digital platform needs to be compliant with best practices and the accessibility guidelines as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (down to Level AA) and Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act (2017). Some issues can be resolved easily while others might require assistance. General guidelines include:
- Write alternative text for images.
- Use subheadings (H2, H3, H4…).
- Avoid pdf files (unless remediated for accessibility) and text-covered image files.
- Visit the accessibility section of the college website for more resources
- Responsive: Ensure the website adjusts to all screen sizes, including its functionality when viewed on a phone. If you think the audience will primarily access the site from a phone, consider a site designed mobile-first. This means the website was designed to be used on a phone first, but is still accessible in other ways.
Fonts: Families & Sizes
- Headings and titles are Rubik, 16–24 px
- Paragraph and body text are Nunito Sans, 12 px
Font families and sizes may be used at your own discretion and more information about text styles can be found in Fractal, the college’s digital style guide repository.
Color Palette
The official four primary colors used on the college website are Red, Dark Teal, Medium Teal and Light Teal. The college also has secondary color palettes if you would like to use them. More details about the colors for college digital materials can be found in Fractal.
Primary Colors Specifications (Hex Codes)
- Red: #AC1A2F
- Dark Teal: #0F4354
- Medium Teal: #559CB4
- Light Teal: #E6EFF2
Headers & Footers
Required Information
- Davidson College logo must be present somewhere on the website. Permitted variations of the Davidson college logo can be downloaded from the college brand guide.
- Include links to the college’s data privacy and accessibility policies in the footer of the webiste.
Davidson College
Privacy Policy & Terms of Use
Accessibility
College Policies & Procedures
Supplemental Assets: Site Wrappers
College Communications has branded HTML website wrappers available on a case-by-case basis. Please email digitialstaff@davidson.edu to discuss your needs.
As examples, the college employment portal and the course schedules website make use of the college-branded site wrappers.
Hero Image & Favicon (Browser Icon)
An optional large hero image can be added underneath the header, as is found across several high-level routing pages and landing pages on davidson.edu, The recommended size for such cover images is 1160px by 400px (height may vary).
We also encourage you to use a browser icon (also known as a favicon) that makes use of a dark gray color background. A favicon is the small icon that shows up in the browser tab next to the name of the webpage.
Please contact the College Communications Office if you need help in attaining a high resolution hero image of campus (several of which can be found in the college’s photo catalog) or for additional file needs.
Additional Digital Style Guide Resources
For more information or questions, please email digitalstaff@davidson.edu.
Additional Resources
Digital Style Guide
The college’s official digital style guide repository (as applied on davidson.edu) lives in a pattern library known as Fractal.