Style and design

Colour tokens include style categories for theme, neutrals, type, states and alerts. When styling components it is important to use the appropriate colour style, so that any changes to these will cascade throughout the system.

Colour contrast and accessibility

When used in combination, some colours on a website can cause problems for people with a visual impairment. Coloured text on buttons or blocks should be carefully considered to ensure there is sufficient contrast.

There are also legal imperatives for us to make our pages as accessible as possible. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 sets the benchmark for our website. We aim to achieve AA compliance.

Visit W3C website

View Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1

Colours can be checked for their contrast and to see if they are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant using the Snook Colour Contrast Check Tool.

This tool allows you to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast "when viewed by someone having colour deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen" [W3C].

The WCAG contrast ratio formula differentiates between text smaller or larger than 18pt. In some cases coloured text larger than 18pt on a coloured background will be AA compliant but will not be compliant when smaller than this.

Colour palette

Secondary palette

Pastel palette tint colours (background usage only)

Tint colours (digital background usage only)

The typefaces used in our website are Sora for headings and Inter for body text. They are geometric, highly legible sans serif typefaces. This maintains consistency across the FedUni site.

Inter

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890!@#$%^&*()

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1234567890!@#$%^&*()

Symbols

The font chosen for all FedUni website symbols is Font Awesome.

For designers and developers it was originally designed for Bootstrap and works great with all frameworks. It is completely free for commercial use and gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customised — size, colour, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS. Use the standard colour scheme when colouring icons.

Headings should describe the content underneath and for someone using specialised software (because they cannot see the page) correctly used headings help them understand how the page is structured.

Headings provide structure to a web page. So, 'heading 2' indicates a subsection of 'heading 1', 'heading 4' indicates a subsection of 'heading 3' and so on. They should not be used for font or presentation effects. Misusing heading styles - eg. to make text appear a certain size - makes it difficult for users with special software to understand how the page is organised and to navigate it.

Our web editor allows coordinators and publishers to select heading styles from 1 - 6.

Because the title of your page will always be heading 1, all subsequent sub-headings should follow accordingly from there. That is,

Page title (heading 1) [specified by CMS template]
Sub title (heading 2) [specified by content publisher] and so on down the page.

Heading styles should only be applied to text that is a heading.

Heading 1 - Sora 500 (1.8rem, #555)

Heading 2 - Sora 500 (1.2rem, #555)

Heading 3 - Sora 500 (1.1rem, #555)

Heading 4 - Sora 500 (1rem, #555)

Body text - Inter 300 (15px, #555)