What is the Unity Framework?
The purpose of this project is to provide a set of flexible and reusable UI components designed to work across browsers, devices and screen sizes. This project is meant to be platform agnostic, meaning it should work equally well across different CMS platforms as well as on static sites.
The project is maintained by DoIT Communications staff, primiarly for use on projects we manage, but we see value in sharing our work and collaborating with the University at large as such we will make regular releases and keep the source code available through our GitHub.
We use a variety of open source technologies and methodologies to help keep us inline with industry and design trends. These technologies include: SASS, GULP, Pattern Lab, Web Fonts and several opensource CSS and JS Libraries including Bootstrap, AnimateCSS, and Breakpoint.
Motivations
Stony Brook University's web presence is enmormous and is only growing larger. Branding, styling and accessibility compliance across our web properities is inconsistent (at best). And we are seeing an increase in the number of mobile computing devices.
Many departments, teams and individuals (faculty, staff and students) have a need for a web presence, often times the work of maintaining the web server, creating the sites design, developing the information architecture and maintaining its content falls on one person, with varying ability in this area and who is often overwhelmed by the amount of work required to properly maintain a large site.
Our current web dev support model is inefficent. Our teams cannot easily take advantage of the front-end work each of us is doing and because of this our sites often fall out of sync with branding requirements and designs, leading to inconsistent experiences for our end users.
Rather than constantly reinvent the wheel with each new project, Unity will provide a framework that our sites can start with in an effort to decrease our workload and increase user satisfaction and compliance with University policies.
Goals
This project pledges that to the best of our ability, sites using this theme and following the guidelines provided will:
What's included?
JS Libraries
- jQuery *required, but not included so you can choose version
- FlexSlider
- Nivo Lightbox
- TableSaw
- CountTo
Additional Assets
- Custom SBU Icon Font
- University Approved Web Fonts
- Selection of Images, Textures and Patterns