Brands influence, inspire and persuade.
At La Trobe, our brand expresses who we are. It helps communicate our values and brings our personality to life. It’s confident and contemporary. Colourful and consistent. It stands out from the crowd.
Our brand is applied to all the University’s touch points where our audiences engage with us – print publications, merchandise, signage, events, digital and social communications, and our online space, the La Trobe University website.
When developing web content for your site, style guides can help you align your visual and written content with our La Trobe brand.
La Trobe’s suite of style guides include:
Design and Brand guidelines
Our Design and Brand guidelines introduce the University brand identity which encompasses our logo, imagery, colour palette and typography. This guide assists in creating consistent and distinctive visual communications to enhance the profile of the University.
Use this guide to help you apply the brand to imagery, and the design and layout for your site, including your landing page and content pages when you’re using the CMS Design System components.
Photography guidelines
La Trobe images should feature our people as lead characters.
We always want the style of our photography to be relevant and authentic. That’s why our first preference is to use a photo taken at one of our La Trobe campuses featuring La Trobe people. People should be portrayed in real settings in natural poses showing real emotions and reactions.
Use this guide to help you select imagery from Cumulus, La Trobe’s online image library. When it’s not possible to use a custom photo from Cumulus, you can use stock imagery from LTU preferred supplier stock libraries. When using stock imagery, the Photography guidelines still apply.
If you have a query about the Photography guidelines, contact the Photography team in Creative and Production.
Writing for the web guidelines
Our Writing for the web guidelines provides web editors with instructions on how to write web text that meets best practice principles and ensure your web content offers a good user experience.
Use this guide to help you use plain English for a wide audience, structure online content, use descriptive link text and adapt your writing style to make reading on-screen easy for users. You can also use the Web content review checklist which provides specific examples of key tasks web editors should check each time they publish content.
Editorial Style Guide
Our Editorial style guide governs the use of written content for La Trobe marketing and communications material, including the La Trobe University website and all subsites.
This guide sets out La Trobe’s preferred style for language, addresses common questions about English usage and helps ensure consistency of expression across the University.
Use this guide to check specific language use and align with this guide in the web content you write for your site.
Tone of voice guidelines
Tone of voice refers to the way we convey our vision, values and story to the world. It covers the words we use, the rhythm and flow of our sentence construction, the grammatical rules we choose to break or follow.
The language we use to express ourselves must be carefully chosen to reflect the La Trobe vision. Our language should be accessible, confident, precise, story driven.
For best practice, align with this guide when you write content for your site.
SEO guidelines
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is used to increase the ranking of a website. You can influence your site to rank in search results, by using tactics to enhance the visibility and usage of your site.
Use the information and checklist in this guide to help optimise your site pages to better rank in search engine results.
For more information or if you have a query related to applying style guides to your site content, contact the relevant team in Marketing, Digital and Insights.
Have questions about your web editing?
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