Fonts, Colors, and Other Formatting

In order to maintain a consistent look and feel between BNL websites, all fonts, colors, and other visual design elements are standardized.

This not only provides users with a consistent interface, it relives the content editor of graphic design tasks, allowing them to focus on content, the information they need to communicate to the rest of the world.

Web technology has advanced considerably since the early days of the Web when presentation and formatting was co-mingled with content, i.e., HTML tags such as <font> and <font size> were wrapped around text content. If an editor wanted to change the font for a website, they had to manually find and replace every HTML tag on every page across the site. This labor-intensive system is no longer used on large, corporate-sized sites where the number of pages may reach into the thousands. Instead, it has been replaced by the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), a single file where all formatting rules are defined. A single change in a site's style sheet changes all pages in the site simultaneously, saving everyone a tremendous amount of boring "grunt" work.

Click here if you want to know more about style sheets.

Considerable thought has gone into the Standard BNL style sheet. Fonts which have been specially designed for easy reading on a computer monitor were selected along with foreground/background color combinations which are known to provide adequate visual contrast and are not hard on the eyes.

In the Content Area, anything typed will be formatted automatically. The only formatting which you should apply is for headings (heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, etc.), bulleted or numbered lists, italics or bolded items.

• For more detailed information, see the User Accessible Styles web page

Note: Always remove all formatting code when pasting in text from other sources such as other web pages or Microsoft Word documents.

If using Microsoft FrontPage, use [Edit] [Paste Special or Paste Text] [Normal Paragraphs]. You can also use Notepad. Paste the text into Notepad, then cut-n-paste it into your web page. Removing all formatting code will guarantee that no extraneous tags are brought in with your text which might overwrite the style sheet and cause other problems.

Last Modified: February 11, 2010

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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