Style Guide

Most of our web styles and colors come from the color and style guide (PDF), which helps align the new site with other communication efforts across campus. 

Fonts

We’re using the Balance font throughout the website, at various weights and sizes. In situations where Balance may be unavailable—for example, in apps or vendor sites—a modern humanist sans-serif such as FF Meta or Helvetica Neue may be substituted.

Typography

Page creators should use the headers and styles available to them in the editor toolbar, and please avoid implementing new fonts using any inline HTML styles. If you have a need for a very specific style, please let us know and we will try to accommodate your request!

Section Headers

Section headers (h2-h6) are available to you via the pulldown editor toolbar. Using these every 100 to 200 words will help break up the text on your page, making it more easily scanned by your readers. Best practices suggest that you use the headers in descending order as you move your readers down the page.

Please use “Title Case” for these headers—meaning capitalize most words, except for certain small words, such as articles and short prepositions.

Colors

Purchase College has always been a colorful place. Unlike many schools that are decorated solely in the colors of their athletic teams, the Purchase brand guidelines provide a vibrant palette that hints at the diversity of our students and academic offerings.

The darkest of these colors have been approved as “web safe” and are available as accent colors for academic programs— these colors are shown on the right, below.

In addition to the vibrant options above, we’re pulling our core site colors live from our homepage photos—which means that the homepage and site navigation can use different colors from moment to moment, or user to user. For that reason, avoid using color in any descriptive how-tos; for example, always say “Click the Admissions tab” instead of “Click the red tab.”