Earlier this weekend a team of developers and designers that makeup the U.S. Digital Service along with web design company 18F got together and published the U.S. Web Design Standards – a set of webdesign guides, style groups, and assets that serve as a guide for creating official U.S. federal government websites.
The U.S. Web Design Standards is a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites. These tools follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and reuse the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design.
The concept behind having a specific set of structured style behind all the different government websites makes complete sense really. Nobody wants to find out that some web design company has been running UI experiments with their tax dollars.
Inside the style guide designers and developers will find 508-compliant colors schemes, a grid system, basic typography rulesets, and common UI components like buttons, forms, menus, labels, alerts, and so on.
The U.S. Web Design Standards first made headlines earlier this weekend, and as of Friday night the website was still up. Unfortunately as of Sunday mid-day, while I sit here and write this post, that very same website brings me to an Application Unavailable error screen. Luckily, 18F is maintaining a GitHub of all the associated assets and styles here.