To establish a common “look and feel” across the University’s Web Presence, a consistent presentation of typographic style is necessary in navigation items, as well as in the content area. To accomplish this, a system of cascading style sheets (CSS) is built into the template. This section of the Visual Style Guide will explain the typographic style of the USC Web Presence.

FONTS
The Arial type font has been chosen as the main typeface used throughout the University’s Web Presence. The font was chosen for its wide availability and easy-to-read on-screen characteristics. Times Roman is the supporting serif font used primarily in all caps for page titles on the banner. Times may also be used at a larger point size as a decorative introductory text style. See the Office of the President homepage, for example.

CASCADING STYLE SHEETS
Cascading style sheets have been used to establish a common typographic style for navigation menu items and body text in the content area of the template. Through this single point of reference, these styles define the font, size, color, and style attributes that are applied to an entire site.
Since these styles apply only to the navigation items (in the text-based templates) and body text, additional local style sheets may be created for sites that require multiple head and subhead sizes, caption styles, and/or bylines. The core typeface, Arial, should be the first font choice in these situations. Size differences and all caps versus caps and lowercase can help establish a hierarchy of head and subhead levels on a page. The Academic Bulletins, for example, have applied this hierarchical head style.

Additional Type Specs
• Header Page Titles
• Navigation Buttons
• Heads, Subheads, & Body