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USWDS: The United States Web Design System

designsystem.digital.gov

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Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#61

Post by WorldMaker »

vosper wrote: post #34
cechmaster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use font icons, I use svg icons with and works great. Much easier to customize when you need to in my opinion.

Font Awesome uses font icons, and they seem to have accessibility figured out? https://fontawesome.com/docs/web/dig-deeper/accessibility

Font Awesome also suggests SVG over web fonts in any app with JS:

https://fontawesome.com/docs/web/dig-deeper/webfont-vs-svg

One of the key notes in the bottom table on that page is "Auto-Accessibility" and the JS libraries with SVG icons provide better accessibility out of the box. Most of the document you linked is stuff you need to do manually by default when working with web fonts.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#62

Post by WorldMaker »

TiredGuy wrote: post #2

The last gov team I was on had trouble with the uswds icon set. There didn't seem to be a way to import them as a font rather than as separate svgs. We noticed though that the icons were roughly based on Material Design icons, so we used the Material Design icon fonts instead and they were close enough. There were still a few icons that didn't map over, but we found some others within the new set that sufficed.

Beyond the accessibility problems, Icon fonts don't tree-shake very well and subsetting them is complicated and requires dedicated tools. Bandwidth may seem cheap/free in many cases, but SVG-based approaches can tree-shake down using ordinary web platform tools like Webpack to just the used SVG curves of the icons needed specific to a page or app and that can save you megabytes compared to most icon fonts.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#63

Post by dwater »

deepspace wrote: post #44

Canada has a similar Web Design System. It is very, very white, with a touch of red and blue. https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html

I'm not surprised. Lena Trudeau served at GSA and stood up 18F, did a 3 year stint at Amazon, and then went to the Canadian Digital Service.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ltrudeau/details/experience/

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#64

Post by chockchocschoir »

EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion

Speaking about accessibility, who came up with that name "magic number"? It's already an overloaded term with multiple meanings and even has one negative one (for constants that has seemingly "magic" meaning or not a fully understood one).

Even something like "contrast ratio" would be immediate to come up with, and much better name as it actually says something on the tin.

> Hey Pete, what is the magic number for our color scheme in article body text?

Makes no sense... Replace "magic number" with "contrast ratio" and suddenly it does make sense.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#65

Post by wallfacer120 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #39
deltarholamda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government agencies love making standards. It provides busy work for the many interns and gives the desk workers a sense of joie de vivre because they're "making a difference." I really love the landing page. Has any landing page ever been useful at all to the end user? It's always a top priority, but on pretty much every site I've ever used it's never seen or used. Often I'll scroll all the way down just so I can ge…

Having seen how bad government websites can be, the design area specifically included (including accessibility concerns) -- I do not consider providing a well-designed useable design system to government to be busy-work. At least not if it actually gets uptake. This one is high-quality enough that if it was done by many interns, those are some really good interns.

Um yeah, but it's the government doing it so it's really important that we all react with scorn and derision, because we're all such bold iconoclasts you see.

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#66

Post by jrochkind1 »

sodality2 wrote: post #48
jrochkind1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to appear/be professional/institutional/official I'd use a custom domain though. Which i assume netlify supports, let's look... sure https://docs.netlify.com/domains-https/custom-domains/ In this case to a proper government domain... aha, I bet there's some policy against pointing .gov.uk hostnames to a third-party platform?

>In this case to a proper government domain... aha, I bet there's some policy against pointing .gov.uk hostnames to a third-party platform? Some guidance that might be relevant: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/use-your-govuk-domain-name?step-...

Doesn't seem to rule out using a .gov.uk domain name for something hosted on netlify.

I agree it looks cheesy and makes me wonder if it's really official government documetnation, without a .gov.uk hostname (and SSL cert, naturally).

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#67

Post by pishpash »

wanda wrote: post #15
Someone1234 wrote: post #5

Developers are an interesting bunch "Why does anyone use Bootstrap anymore?" and then goes and creates basically the exact same components again by hand. Seems like that same trend repeats every couple of years "[Popular library] is now outdated, let me just create an in-house clone or move to identical but trendy [Popular library]." To be clear I very much like the USWDS components, but they are mostly 1:1 with Boot…

Nope, you're not missing anything really, but I'm sure glad that not every website looks like a Bootstrap 3. I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use. In fact, I think the government would not take very kindly to hobbyists making official-looking websites serving a non-government agenda. Front-end isn't th…

> I think these government ones are more about keeping a consistent style and look across departmental websites, than advertising a product for general use.

And how long will this last? Until the next administration who hates the association with the predecessor's style?

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#68

Post by astroalex »

warpech wrote: post #45

The term "design system" made a great career in a very short time. It wasn't really coined until 2016.

That's not correct. A quick search using Google's Ngram viewer shows that "design system" peaked in 1986, and had quite a long history before that too, starting in the 1960s.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=design+system&...

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#69

Post by brimble »

stevenhuang wrote: post #60
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My default address bar search is DDG, but need to fallback to google at times, and I keep my iPhone relatively google-free (Other than google voice).

Use !g at start or end of your query to query google https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Or, indeed, anywhere in your query. "test !g query" will search Google for "test query".

Re: USWDS: The United States Web Design System

#70

Post by laurent92 »

tablespoon wrote: post #41
EricE wrote: post #18

Anyone with any part in designing user interfaces seriously needs to commit their section on color to heart: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but button…

> Especially the contrast/magic number discussion. It's crazy how many user interfaces these days blur design elements to where you can't tell were controls are. The recent trend to eliminate window title bars is particularly infuriating, but buttons that don't look like buttons because they blend into the background are another pet peeve - or have light gray on dark gray. Ugh! Contrast serves a purpose! Modern UX de…

It’s boring when UIs have a stark contrast; What makes light contrasts beautiful is rarity. Perhaps in the future, extremely elusive UIs with very faint variations will be the top of the design fashion after using cookies to know the user’s tolerance to light contrast.

For example, today’s movies are pitch black because they want to upsell 5000:1 screens. The sole reason it didn’t happen to software yet is because we don’t receive any kickback from screen manufacturers, as opposed to movies.

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