Capturing Campus Cuisine: Choosing a MSU Theme

Over the Winter break and into the beginning of this semester I  have been working on building and editing the framework for the Capturing Campus Cuisine website on the early food practices at Michigan State University. Following discussions with Susan Kooiman, my fellow Campus Archaeology fellow on this project and Dr. Goldstein, we wanted to have the website follow as close as possible to the historic colors and fonts used by the University. How is this even possible you ask? Well, there happens to be a webpage created by MSU specifically for these purposes! Check it out!

MSU provides not only the typefaces that are used to portray the MSU brand, but gives advice on where to use the various options. What I will be doing while editing the front-end Bootstrap framework is changing the default text to either adhere to (or if not possible) to most similarly resemble the MSU preferred fonts.

Now, what else can I attempt to make our site as historically accurate MSU as possible? Colors of course! Not only does this site provide what colors are currently being used, it also provides the secondary colors that have been used throughout MSU’s history (as seen below). The colors that the Campus Archaeology Program uses to emulate MSU’s history include the classic MSU green, deep purple, and light brown. 

For this specific project. I have chosen the background of the webpage to be the unforgettable MSU Green with a black header and footer. The writing in both of these sections will be in white, but when links or tabs are hovered over, they will change into the light brown color. I will also be using the deep purple as an accent color throughout the site. Below are some preliminary uses of the MSU colors! While the change between the white and light brown is only slight, it will allow our visitors to know that what their ‘pointer’ is hovered over is a link, and also show one of MSU’s historical colors.

Capturing Campus Cuisine: Top of Landing Page

Capturing Campus Cuisine: Hover Over Link Color

If you have any suggestions on how or where to use some of MSU’s secondary colors please let me know! I’ve been having a blast playing around with various color combinations that fit well together and are also ADA compliant.