MSU Legal Footer

General Standards

• Required on every institutional webpage
• Exemption: Intercollegiate Athletics

Additional Standards for Mobile

Designing for mobile devices requires special consideration.

Mobile and tablet screen aspect ratio and resolution vary across devices and operating systems. The layout and spacing information in this section provides guidance on placement and presentation of required elements on mobile devices.

• Make footer 73 pixels tall.
• Place below the web layout.
• Align website information and horizontal rule with center of page.
• Align MSU main campus information with left webpage content margin.
• Align MSU wordmark with center of page.
• Do not place additional elements within or below this region.

• Use approved, unaltered versions of graphics. (See MSU Brand Studio.)
• Link MSU wordmark graphic to https://msu.edu.
• Format phone numbers this way: 517-355-1855.
• Links in line 1 should appear in the sequence indicated and with the indicated link text: Contact Information, Site Map, Privacy Statement, Site Accessibility.
• Omit site map link if desired as long as the web user has at least two ways in which to navigate to every page on the website. This is covered in WCAG 2.0 Guideline 2.4.5 “Multiple Ways.” For more information, see the W3C WCAG 2.0 techniques for providing a site map.
• Do not combine with any other marks, graphic elements or words.

MSU Wordmark Graphic

• The MSU wordmark graphic is 221 x 47 pixels and is a hyperlink to the MSU website homepage.
• The wordmark is available in black, white and Spartan Green.
• The wordmark can be downloaded from the MSU Brand Studio’s Logos and Marks webpage.

Website Information

The website information area in the standard footer should include:

• Call us: 517-XXX-XXXX: Use the telephone number associated with the office or college. Including this element is recommended, but not required. Note: Replace “XXX-XXXX” with an actual telephone number.
• Contact information: Hyperlink this text to a page in the website that provides street address, phone and fax numbers, and email address contact information for the website.
• Site map: Hyperlink this text to a page in the website that provides an outline structure of every section in the website. To be accessible, a site map has certain requirements. For example, every page in the site map must have a link to the site map, and every page can be reached by following a set of links that start at the site map. Site maps may be omitted (if desired) as long as the web user has at least two ways in which to navigate to every page in the website. This is covered in WCAG 2.0 Guideline 2.4.5 “Multiple Ways.” For more information, see the W3C WCAG 2.0 techniques for providing a site map.
• Privacy statement: Hyperlink this text to the university privacy statement page.
• Site accessibility: Hyperlink this text to a page on the website that describes and documents the functionality and standards the website uses to provide people with disabilities access to information and services.

Horizontal Rule

The website information and MSU information areas are separated using a 1-pixel, dotted rule (#999999) equal to the width of the website information element.

MSU Information

The MSU information area should include:

• MSU’s telephone number: 517-355-1855 (the university operator’s phone number)
• Visit msu.edu: Hyperlink to the MSU website homepage.
• SPARTANS WILL.
• Notice of Nondiscrimination: Link to the Notice of Non-Discrimination, Anti-Harassment and Non-Retaliation on the Office for Civil Rights and Title IX Education and Compliance website.
• Copyright statement: Use HTML character code “©” for the copyright symbol.

Typography and Color

Font size is specified for the approved variations below in both absolute and relative measurements, or rems. Pixels are an absolute size where 1px = 1/96th of an inch. Rems are relative to the root (html) element font size. CSS best practice is to provide both units so that browsers that do not support rem will use the fallback pixel property value.

For example, assuming that a browser’s default font size is 16px:
1 rem = 16 px | 0.875 rem = 14 px | 0.75 rem = 12 px | 0.625 rem = 10 px | 0.5625 rem = 9 px | 0.5 rem = 8 px | etc.

In this example, the resulting CSS is:

Additional resources:

• W3C Techniques for Testing Contrast Ratio
• MSU Web Accessibility Evaluation and Validation online tools