Branding & Content Guidelines

All University of Missouri websites should adhere to identity standards and brand guidelines.

Colors

Use Mizzou’s primary and secondary color pallets for your website.

Consult the color contrast chart and the accessible text & color guide to ensure standards for foreground and background elements are met.

Fonts

Only used approved brand web-fonts for Mizzou websites:

  • Graphik Condensed Black
  • Clarendon URW
  • Open Sans

Writing style

Follow The Associated Press Stylebook and exceptions as published in the Editorial style guide.

Domain Names

Like brick-and-mortar buildings, websites have addresses. Called IP addresses, they consist of long strings of numbers. To make IP addresses easier to remember, the Domain Name System was devised, generating user-friendly mechanisms to get people where they want to go on the Web more easily. Instead of learning “128.206.12.246,” for example, a user needs only to remember “missouri.edu.”

The University of Missouri’s domain name, missouri.edu, also serves as the university’s homepage.

All MU administrative units, academic units, programs, centers, and labs are required to use a missouri.edu subdomain name. When selecting a subdomain, choose a name that is intuitive, brief, marketable, and reflective of the unit’s affiliation with Mizzou.

Examples:

Domain names affiliated with websites that are not on University of Missouri servers are not allowed to include university trademarked verbiage such as Mizzou, Missouri, MU, etc. in the domain name.

To request a subdomain/domain name, contact Licensing & Brand Management by emailing identity@missouri.edu.

After a subdomain/domain name has been vetted by Licensing & Brand Management, you will be instructed to contact MU’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) who manages the domain name service (DNS) and Internet protocol (IP) addresses for the MU campus.

    • Contact DoIT at 573-882-5000
    • DoIT will work with an MU unit to obtain the approved subdomain name within the missouri.edu domain.

Favicons

University websites should use the stacked MU for the favicon, which is the icon displayed in the tab of your browser window, helping distinguish multiple tabs from one another.

Header

The header at the top of each page should identify the website as being part of the University of Missouri.

  • Logo/Signature Options
    • Include the University signature. Always link it back to the MU homepage at missouri.edu.
    • Include full unit signature for the unit or organization.

Footer

The footer at the bottom of each page of every University of Missouri website must contain contact information, copyright and nondiscrimination information, with links to further details.

Contact information
Before the legal content, the footer should contain contact information detailing:

    • The unit responsible for ownership of the site. If applicable, that text should link to a different website representing the unit.
    • A physical address
    • An email address
    • A phone number

Copyright & Nondiscrimination Information

Copyright and statement of non-discrimination

© [YEAR] — Curators of the University of Missouri. All rights reserved. DMCA and other copyright information. An equal opportunity/access/affirmative action/pro-disabled and veteran employer.

If your webpages have a “.php” file extension (identity.missouri.edu/websites/footer.php) you can use the following code to automate the year:
<?php echo date('Y'); ?>
This allows the date to update automatically every year.

Links
The footer links are:

  • Example

Published by Marketing & Communications, 111 Jesse Hall, Columbia, MO 65211, Email: marcom@missouri.edu, Phone: 573-882-4523

© 2021 — Curators of the University of Missouri. All rights reserved. DMCA and other copyright information. An equal opportunity/access/affirmative action/pro-disabled and veteran employer.

Best Practices

  • Optimize images for web
  • Review contact and deadline information every semester
  • Check site links monthly
  • Remove outdated pages from server