Introduction

Overview

Our website is inspired by the UW Medicine brand. We incorporate on-brand fonts, colors, icons, buttons, and other web design elements that enhance engagement and accessibility.

This Digital Style Guide will introduce you to the web design components and their recommended usage on the site.

Web design components are reusable building blocks that make up web pages and applications. These components are strategically designed and coded to be maintained, updated, and re-used for specific features on web pages.

Components include fonts, icons, buttons, photos, and many more. Each component (and each element within the component) serves a specific purpose, captures a particular functionality or visual element, and aims to align with accessibility standards↓.

The Digital Experience Team

Our Digital Experience (DX) team of User Experience (UX) professionals can work with you on:

Building pages that will help you achieve your business goals and KPIs.
Telling the story of your department or services it provides.
Provide UX Design and content strategy for your webpages.
Design pathways for scheduling appointments, paying bills or joining our organization.

If you have a website project in mind, please fill out our Digital Experience (DX) Request Form (wrike.com)

If you have minor web updates for existing webpages (i.e. text changes), please use the UW Medicine Website Requests | UW Medicine (Works only in Chrome browser)

Accessibility

The goal of the University of Washington, including UW Medicine, as stated in the University of Washington IT Accessibility Guidelines, is to work towards meeting international standards for web accessibility, W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. To help the UW community attain this goal, UW has developed an IT Accessibility Checklist, designed to present WCAG principles in ways that are easy to understand and apply.

In line with this, content professionals, designers, and developers should do their best in ensuring that all web designed components comply with WCAG 2.x Level AA, a measurement of accessibility. All component design changes must be discussed with a UX designer on the Digital Experience (DX) team to ensure components still adhere to WCAG. This reduces the risk of legal and compliance accessibility issues.