Post by Tim, Corporate Digital Team, Welsh Government

We’re developing the GOV.WALES Global Experience Language (GEL) design system to help teams build consistent, accessible, and efficient digital products. Here’s how it works and what we’re planning.

Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gwmraeg

What a design system is

The GOV.WALES GEL design system defines standards, components, and guidelines. Teams apply these consistently across their digital products.

For example, our design system includes a component for showing a success message after a form is submitted.

Our design system can be applied across products developed and hosted on different technologies by different suppliers.

Why use a design system

Defining a single set of standards for GOV.WALES helps us to:

• ensure a consistently usable and accessible user experience
• maintain the GOV.WALES brand
• improve efficiency

Product teams apply the common standard and use the saved time to do work unique to their product, for example optimising the user journey.

Our design library now

We have a design library as a Sketch file and as a PDF:

• Sketch enables designers with the software to quickly develop compliant low-cost prototypes
• the PDF needs no special software, so the whole product team can view the design system

Our plan for a complete design system

We’re moving our design library from Sketch to Figma, a more widely used web-based tool. As part of this transition, we’re simplifying the system by:

• reducing unnecessary variants
• restructuring component groups for clarity

These improvements will help designers across product teams prototype more efficiently and maintain consistency.

For the build phase of a product, we’re working toward supporting teams with a fully coded component library. This will include Storybook, React UI components, SASS and CSS with a relative Figma library and templating system.

The component library is one part of our design system. Other parts include guidance and patterns, some of which are already published in the GOV.WALES standards.

These standards also cover content design, which plays a crucial role in GOV.WALES products. For example, content designers write the text used in the start page pattern.

We’re now looking at how to present all of this in a clear, cohesive way, so product teams can easily use the design system.

Stay involved

We’d love to hear your ideas. Comment on this post or email us at digital@gov.wales.