Welcome — let's get your program its branding
This is the applicant's journey, turned around: you are the applicant, and what you're applying for is your program's brand. You'll walk the same path a student walks — identify, choose, review, decide — and at the end you receive upload-ready build.css and build.xslt for your Slate TEST instance. Every choice is held inside the guardrails, so whatever you pick is accessible and on-brand by construction.
Offline tool — nothing here uploads, Previews, or Publishes. The files are yours to hand to Slate. Access & equity aren't options; they're the brief.
Which program are you applying for?
Pick your program. Its shell (the build.xslt layout) is settled per program; the brand body (build.css) is shared across all five — so your color choice previews a change the whole fleet would receive.
Choose your brand color — within the guardrails
Pick a primary color. The preview re-renders live. The rail can't be crossed: anything failing AA contrast (≥ 4.5:1 for white text) or the zero gold/green-on-web rule is refused in place, and your last safe color is kept.
Review your application
Here's what you've chosen. Everything below already passes the guardrails.
Are you sure?
Submitting will generate your upload-ready files. You can always come back and choose again — nothing is uploaded or published; the files are handed to you.
Decision: your branding is approved
build.css
The shared brand body, with your color applied to the primary token --som-blue (Vibrant Blue by default — drives links, buttons, accents). SOM Blue (#001c42) hover/active states are preserved as the canonical secondary — see the note below.
build.xslt
Your program's shell layout, served verbatim — no color lives here.
- In Slate, open Branding Editor → Files.
- Replace
build.cssandbuild.xsltwith the two files above (exact names). - Save, then Preview in a fresh tab. Don't Publish until it's signed off.
Your primary color drives the ~96 link/button/accent uses through --som-blue (default: Vibrant Blue #000F9F). The brand's SOM Blue (#001c42) hover/active states are kept as the canonical secondary per the live Storybook palette — the official companion to Vibrant Blue, not auto-derived. Provenance & review IDs live in the package manifest (the official npm run slate:package-instance path), not in the CSS itself.
Walk it as your applicant
This is the part that matters. You've set your brand — now live what your applicant lives, in your color. Create an account, fill the application, watch your status, reach the decision. Every screen is the real Slate surface, recolored to your choice. It's a sandbox — nothing submits, nothing is stored, no real sign-in; the fields carry sample data you can edit. The point isn't the data. It's the walk.
You just felt the friction your applicants feel — the fields, the waiting, the next-step hunt. That's the brief: access and equity, built in from the first screen. Now you know.