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magnio

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries:

- The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

- The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/

- Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html

- Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/

- Italy: https://designers.italia.it/

- Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/

- Estonia: https://brand.estonia.ee/

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Australia: https://designsystemau.org/

it was the official design system until it got defunded, now I believe it's run by open source

The New South Wales state design system is still fairly consistently used: https://www.digital.nsw.gov.au/delivery/digital-service-tool...

It's open source on GitHub: https://digitalnsw.github.io/nsw-design-system/

Beautifully simple and incredibly fast to load. Well done Australia (hope the idiots who defunded it got kicked out of power after the last election and this will be fixed).

Wow that might be the fastest website ive seen

France: https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/

Will have to inform the french national services about it ("Ameli", "Impôts", "URSSAF"), apparently they are not aware of it!

It's one of the objective in the long run but it does require a lot of work to get everyone on the same page.

I am currently working on implementing the "Système de Design de l'État" for a french governement service but unfortunately it is still pretty chaotic right now since there are many modifications of components with breaking-changes / no backwards compatibility with almost every releases.

Don't worry, I know it's not that easy, and good for you for sticking to the design system rules! My sarcasm was mostly directed to the chaos introduced in state services by giant consulting firms doing there own thing quick and dirty...

Yeah, in theory the French government offers a ton of super-useful APIs to its services (to automatically fetch paperwork for a procedure, for instance) but the big services use almost none of them.

Netherlands: https://www.rijkshuisstijl.nl/

OMG. This is HN! Can we please get a showcase of the best e-gov't website globally? Right away, when I saw that Italian gov't has a web design studio, I was curious! Do they have some beautiful, but highly functional websites that any Italians can share? (Apologies for positive stereotyping!)

I would remove Italy from that list. It's all very random.

https://www.salute.gov.it/portale/home.html

https://www.dgc.gov.it/web/

https://www.governo.it/

https://www.interno.gov.it/it

https://presidenza.governo.it/USRI/confessioni/diritti_umani...

https://www.senato.it/

https://www.mef.gov.it/

https://www.camera.it/

https://www.agenziaentrate.gov.it/portale/

http://www.impresa.gov.it/intro/info/news.html

I'm afraid there won't be anything like that in Germany any time soon.

Wait, the Germans, of all people, don’t have a standard government design system? Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one, and I’ll have to throw out my entire set of national stereotypes!

As someone from Germany I'm sometimes surprised what stereotypes exist outside Germany about it.

I can assure you standardizing things is not something Germany is good at.

The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Public sector and the old people are not good at modern solutions, but German officials and companies in general are still very driven in organizing and standardizing the soul out of everything.

We Germans probably have a standard design system for the documents we send by Fax...

Or print out hundreds of pages of documents nobody reads and awkwardly wait while someone painstakingly scans each one to “have it digital”.

Of course we do.

https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/

Edit: under “Hilfsmittel” there‘s a “Web Component Library”, hidden behind a login.

It's not entirely surprising. Germany is a federal republic, somewhat similar to the US, with some degree of autonomy for its member states. Switzerland is a confederacy.

This needs correcting. Germany and Switzerland are both federal states, they occupy the same spot on the notional spectrum. <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/The_path...> The comment would have a point if either state was unitary, but this is not the case.

Switzerland was a confederation prior to 1848, the now inaccurate name stuck for I assume sentimental reasons. The issue of republics is orthogonal to the topic under discussion.

My point is that they're both not the most centralised form of government. Even if Switzerland is officially a federation instead of the confederacy its name suggests, the point still stands.

> Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one

Well... at a federal level there is, but it's a confederacy so most of the time you're interacting with a local canton which has it's own set of systems.

1. Our population is quite old thus many people in key positions are quite old and missed the transition to the digital world.

2. So. Much. Bureaucracy.

3. Another factor that doesnt help is that the government pays quite poorly compared to the private companies. Any semi talented dev will find a better position than working for the government

The bureaucracy can be a good thing, because it also makes it harder for the government to get information on its citizens, and I think this is deliberate after WW2. Making it hard to exchange information is annoying (I've heard fax machines were still in use during the corona pandemic) but serves as an additional layer of protection from hostile governments. Time will tell if digitizing everything in for instance Denmark (my country) was a good idea.

Number 3 is the same in Denmark. You can almost double your salary if you work for the private sector.

It actually exists in the form of this CMS: https://produkt.gsb.bund.de/DE/Home/home_node.html

However, I believe it's mostly the federal ministries that use it.

It exists but I think it's undeniable that Germany is behind in many digital aspects, even in advertising. I think part of that is cultural (credit card acceptance and advertising being good examples) and another part existing bureaucracy.

- Ukraine: https://diia.fedoriv.com/

- Russia: http://gov.design/

Ironic that it's http

In Soviet Russia, specification website learns about you.

Is this a parody? Knockoff? Why is a Russian government site on an English domain name under some random tld?

- Czech Republic: https://designsystem.gov.cz/

New Zealand is launching one soon that is heavily based on the UK system. https://design-system-alpha.digital.govt.nz/

Austria: https://design.austria.info/en/design-system/

Of all the examples in this thread, this is the only one that isn't a plain HTML page, but rather a pile of javascript that takes several seconds to load and shows nothing but an "enable javascript" banner without JS. Despicable, but also absolutely typical.

Edit: alright, CZ, UA and RU further down the thread are the same, I just hadn't gotten to those yet. Still, absolutely unacceptable for a government design standard.

This isn't even a government design standard (or government website for that matter). If looking into the impress you will find that it is run by a Verein that's promoting tourism. To quote:

> Promotion of Austria as a holiday destination.

There is a corporate design guide available [0] but from what I can tell it's more of a guide for "everything" not just websites.

[0]: https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/service/corporate-design....

Greece: https://guide.services.gov.gr/

It's nice, but also gets boring and restrive quiet quickly in Governmental organisations I've worked for.

> Boring

I feel like that's a great quality. As for restrictive, that's a valid concern.

Wait till you work with the team, and they decide to make all highlighted colors like a an extreme warning sign because "accesiblity" and 10 other dramatic choices and they prefer to be dominant debaters "I decide and you listen to me because you are not part of the team" instead of any reason.

Perhaps. But user expectations are otherwise. Especially when lack of guardrails too often leads to wacky and wonky experiences.

<strike>wacky and wonky experiences</strike> inaccessible FTFY

Needs more <marquee>

If only every government website I visited was boring and predictable.

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