Content & Design Guidelines for NIH Home Page Slides

Acceptable Slides for the NIH home page need to meet one of the following criteria. Slides should be used:

• to highlight NIH health campaigns
• to announce important new clinical finding or breakthrough announcements developed with support from NIH
• to highlight NIH information and resources that relate to a breaking national public health issue or emergency
• to highlight NIH program initiatives, especially those that are trans-NIH in nature, such new award programs
• to highlight unique NIH-sponsored educational resources of broad interest to multiple audiences
• to promote directorial announcements and other key messages that concern overall [NIH or DHHS] agency goals, policies, and priorities

Slides are for topics of broad interest. Announcements of local interest for or for specific audiences should be handled in a targeted fashion.

Slides are designed to point to an existing NIH URL. We cannot point to NIH sites residing in non-government domains unless you have an HHS domain name exemption.

Slides should not be used to promote specific meetings. Promotion for local meetings of interest to selected audiences is better suited for other areas of our website such as http://www.nih.gov/news/index.html#events and http://calendar.nih.gov. More sources for advertising events are available at http://www.nih.gov/employee/advert.htm.

Slides need to meet a high level of quality in terms of graphics and design. They need to be prepared by a professional graphics designer; the text on a slide needs to be limited in length—easy to digest at a glance; content needs to be clear, concise, and jargon-free.

The slideshow has been designed to be universally accessible by users and user agents/devices. Development was done using software that had built-in accessibility components. The product was tested using one of the industry-standard screen readers. Efforts have been made to adhere to the Section 508 guidelines for the Web.

For more information, please visit Adobe Accessibility Center.

Technical Specifications:

To add new slides, create new graphics in JPEG format. The images should be 410 pixels wide by 199 pixels high. See figure below.

Figure - Sample New Slide – Annotated

1. 136x27—leave open for navigation
2. 178x35—recommended area for the "more information" link
3. A 7-pixel border will be dynamically added to slides. Slide text should be inside this border so it does not get cut off.

The image should be optimized for web display. A link URL should be provided so that when the user clicks on the slide they can be taken to another Web page.