Interactive
Cornell University
Johnson Cornell
Interactive Director
00 — Foundations
Four principles
01 — Color
Palette
Carnelian is the single brand hue. Everything else is a warm-neutral grayscale tuned for dark screens, plus one bone tint for light surfaces.
Brand
Interface neutrals
✓ Pairing
White or Silver text on Ink / Charcoal. Carnelian for the mark, Signal Red for the one primary action per view.
✕ Avoid
Two reds competing on one screen, red body text, or pure-white #FFF fills as large surfaces — use warm Bone instead.
02 — Typography
Type system
A two-family pairing. Cinzel — a Trajan-style capital serif — stands in for the engraved wordmark and headlines. Helvetica Neue handles all interface and body text.
Display — Cinzel
JOHNSON
Cornell University
Reserved for the wordmark, section titles, and hero statements. Set in caps or title case, generous tracking, never below 20px.
Interface — Helvetica Neue
Strategic Marketing
Clean, neutral, legible at small sizes on dark backgrounds. Weights 400 / 600 / 700. This is the workhorse for menus, lists, cards and long copy.
Scale
05 — In practice
Design screens
The system assembled: dark canvas, crimson accents, editorial type, pill controls, line-icon navigation and warm full-bleed photography working together across web and app.
What to notice
- Full-bleed campus imagery under a legibility scrim
- Persistent five-slot line-icon tab bar
- Signal-Red chips label media and hotspots
- Serif wordmark locked top-left on every screen
✓ Do
- Warm, natural light with red / amber tones
- One crimson action per screen
- Full-bleed crops with a bottom gradient scrim
✕ Don't
- Cold blue-hour or desaturated photography
- Two competing reds on one screen
- White-text captions without a scrim behind them
