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What we do

We maintain the GOV.UK Design System and related tools. For guidance on supporting our products, see Products we support.

Our products

The design system is principally made up of 3 separate but intersecting artifacts that help us serve our users in different ways.

GOV.UK Frontend

The frontend code package that we publish via npm (Node Package Manager). Service teams use this package when building their service to more easily make their services look like GOV.UK and gain access to our styles and components.

We also include APIs which enable our users to:

  • manipulate individual components
  • gain access to and interact with our styles

GOV.UK Design System

The GOV.UK Design System website functions as a directory of everything in GOV.UK Frontend, notably our styles and components, as well as common frontend patterns in government services such as form questions and pages.

As a contribution based design system, the website also provides ways that users can interact with us and get involved in contribution or community activities in our Community section.

The website also links out to additional digital government resources such as ports of GOV.UK Frontend for specific tech stacks.

GOV.UK Frontend docs

The GOV.UK Frontend docs are the technical documentation for GOV.UK Frontend. This is another guidance website focused on technical documentation rather than as a directory of our design system and a ‘brochure’ for the product the way that the Design System website is. This contains:

  • technical guides for installing and using GOV.UK Frontend
  • guides for managing frontend architecture and staying up to date
  • complete API references for our Sass and JavaScript

We expect the audience for the Frontend docs to be more technical and at a point in their development process where they’re trying to understand how to build something with GOV.UK Frontend.

Also actively developed

Our team also work on:

  • Community backlog - a backlog of user-submitted component and pattern suggestions for inclusion into the Design System.
  • stylelint-config-gds - a stylelint configuration for SCSS and CSS files across GDS.

Maintenance

  • Accessible Autocomplete - a standalone component that helps users choose answers from a provided list.
  • GOV.UK Prototype Kit - a tool to quickly make interactive, accessible and realistic prototypes of GOV.UK services.

Legacy products

Other pages in this section