- Web publishing
- Style guide
- Colors
Color schemes for Yale web pages
Color has a long and important symbolic history at Yale, and “Yale Blue” is one of the foundational elements of University identity. In 2006, as part of the redesign of Yale’s front door “Blue Site,” the site design team introduced "Yale Web Blue" to the essential colors that convey Yale identity.
Here we have used Yale Web Blue (hex color #0F4D92) as a touchstone for the development of a variety of color schemes that provide web authors with many alternatives for achieving a distinctive look for their sites, while remaining in harmony with Yale’s general web identity.
Color themes
To facilitate communication in Yale’s YaleSite web publishing environment we have given names to some of the color combinations designed into the YaleSite System. At the launch of the YaleSite system (February 2010) just a few color combinations exist as templates and themes, but we expect to develop a wider range of templates and color choices as the system matures.
How the color themes were developed
The Office of the University Printer, collaboration with Yale Web Publishing Services, took a systematic look at the color families of many existing Yale web sites that have been designed since the launch of the current Blue Site in August 2006. Example swatches from "Blue Site" designs:
We then used that family of colors as the starting point for a color system. We established base, neutral, header typography, and accent colors for the theme variations:
These color variation groups were used as the basic for an initial set of four Yale YaleSite/SimpleSite templates. For example, the “Eli” group is similar to the colors that have been used in the Yale business sites for the past four years:
Next: The initial YaleSite color themes
