When SiteNow v2 was first being developed, ITS had to set up websites with a temporary theme while OSC developed and delivered their new brand manual to campus.
As part of the recent uiowa.edu homepage redesign project, a great deal of work was done to finalize brand guidelines, create the University of Iowa Design System (UIDS) and apply the brand to both uiowa.edu and to the new brand manual website. The brand manual website is a SiteNow v2 website and is an early adopter of UIDS Base (the brand theme for SiteNow v2). You can read more about the brand guidelines and see the new look and feel in advance by going to the brand manual website.
UIDS Base pulls finalized components from the UIDS and adapts them around current SiteNow v2 features, making the transition from the temporary theme to the new, branded theme mostly visual with no action from the site owner needed. There are however a few adjustments you can choose to make after the theme has been deployed:
- UIDS Base supports equal height cards. Set section content vertical alignment to "none" to achieve the equal height effect.
- Previous manual adjustments to padding (e.g. empty html tags, extra section padding) should be revisited on a case-by-case basis.
- Previously placed lockups in the footer have been removed and replaced by the block Iowa wordmark per brand guidelines. A copy of the previous lockup should be located on the last page of a website's media overview (admin/content/media).
- Slogans are no longer rendered in the theme.
- You can add a parent organization for your website and the global header will be adjusted accordingly (admin/config/system/site-information#edit-site-information).
- Footer menus have been renamed and there is now a third footer menu available for use.
- Footer content has been moved into the Footer Contact Info block.
- Quick Links previously placed in the University of Iowa Branding bar have been moved to the Top Links menu (admin/structure/menu/manage/top-links). Only the first two top links will be rendered.
- The header and footer no longer span the full-width of the browser. You can adjust your content to match by selecting section content width to "Medium."
- There have been no changes to image aspect ratios as part of this deployment.
There will be brief interruptions for un-cached pages and logged in users while this is being deployed. Please contact the ITS Help-Desk if you encounter continuous interruption on your website.
Check out our gallery of before and after screenshots detailing the changes websites will see. View gallery.