The Draft U.S. Web Design Standards include a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites.
Previously, the website and documentation for the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards were also part of this repository. To provide more clarity to both people who want to work with the Standards and people who work with the documentation locally, we have separated these into two repositories. This repository is for the Standards themselves.
18F maintains another repository for the documentation and website. To see the Standards and documentation on the web, visit https://standards.usa.gov.
- Background
- Recent updates
- Getting started
- Use the Standards
- Our use of branches
- Need installation help?
- Contributing to the code base
- Reuse of open-source style guides
- Licenses and attribution
The components and style guide of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and use the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design. The U.S. Digital Service and 18F created and maintain the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards for designers and developers. They are designed for use by government product teams who want to create beautiful, easy-to-use online experiences for the public. To learn more about the project, check out this blog post.
Information about the most recent release of the Standards can always be found in the release history. We include details about significant updates and any backwards incompatible changes along with a list of all changes.
We’re glad you’d like to use the Standards — here’s how you can get started:
- Designers: Check out our Getting Started for Designers information.
- Developers: Follow the instructions in this README to get started.
There are a few different ways to use the Standards within your project. Which one you choose depends on the needs of your project and how you are most comfortable working.
To use the Draft Web Design Standards on your project, you’ll need to include the CSS and JavaScript files in each HTML page in your project.
First, download the Draft Web Design Standards assets:
https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/releases/download/v0.13.1/uswds-0.13.1.zip
Then, add the following folders into a relevant place in your code base — likely a directory where you keep third-party libraries:
uswds-0.13.1/
├── js/
│ ├── uswds.min.js.map
│ ├── uswds.min.js
│ └── uswds.js
├── css/
│ ├── uswds.min.css.map
│ ├── uswds.min.css
│ └── uswds.css
├── img/
└── fonts/
Refer to these files by adding the following <link> and <script> elements
into each of your HTML pages:
Add this to your <head> element:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/your/assets/css/lib/uswds.min.css">Add this before the closing </body> tag:
<script src="/path/to/your/assets/js/lib/uswds.min.js"></script>We offer both files, the CSS and the JavaScript, in two versions — a minified version, and an un-minified one. (In the examples above, we are using the minified files.) Use the minified files in a production environment or to reduce the file size of your downloaded assets. And the un-minified files are better if you are in a development environment or would like to debug the CSS or JavaScript assets in the browser.
This version of the Standards includes jQuery version 2.2.0 bundled within the
JavaScript file. Please make sure that you’re not including any other version
of jQuery on your page.
And that’s it — you should be set to use the Standards.
If you have node installed on your machine, you can use npm to install the Standards. Add uswds
to your project’s package.json as a dependency:
npm install --save uswdsThe package will be installed in node_modules/uswds. You can use the un-compiled files
found in the src/ or the compiled files in the dist/ directory.
node_modules/uswds/
├── dist/
│ ├── css/
│ ├── fonts/
│ ├── img/
│ ├── js/
└── src/
├── fonts/
├── img/
├── js/
└── stylesheets/
require('uswds') will load all of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards’ JavaScript onto the page. The uswds module itself does not export anything.
The main Sass (SCSS) source file is here:
node_modules/uswds/src/stylesheets/all.scss
The non-minified CSS that’s been precompiled is here:
node_modules/uswds/dist/css/uswds.css
If you’re using another framework or package manager that doesn’t support npm, you can find the source files in this repository and use them in your project. Otherwise, we recommend that you follow the download instructions. Please note that the core team isn’t responsible for all frameworks’ implementations.
If you’re interested in maintaining a package that helps us distribute the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards, the project’s build system can help you create distribution bundles to use in your project. Please read our contributing guidelines to locally build distributions for your framework or package manager.
The staging branch is the bleeding edge of development. When cutting a new release, we update the versioning on our files by branching off of the staging branch and submitting a pull request into our release branch. This helps to make staging a place that can always receive contributions, no matter where we are in the release process. New commits to staging are automatically deployed to our staging site.
The master branch always holds the latest production-ready release. When cutting a release, we create a release branch from staging named for the new version: for example, v0.9.x. Once we’ve completed QA on that branch, we tag the release and merge it into the master branch.
The branches 18f-pages and 18f-pages-staging used to be the primary release and development branches, back when the site was hosted on pages.18f.gov. Those branches still auto deploy to 18F Pages, but will now only contain minimal redirects to the new site.
Do you have questions or need help with setup? Did you run into any weird errors while following these instructions? Feel free to open an issue here:
https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues.
You can also email us directly at [email protected].
For complete instructions on how to contribute code, please read CONTRIBUTING.md. These instructions also include guidance on how to set up your own copy of the Standards style guide website for development.
If you would like to learn more about our workflow process, check out the Workflow and Label Glossary pages on the wiki.
If you have questions or concerns about our contributing workflow, please contact us by filing a GitHub issue or emailing our team.
Much of the guidance in the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards leans on open source designs, code, and patterns from other civic and government organizations, including:
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Design Manual
- U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Design Patterns
- Healthcare.gov Style Guide
- UK’s Government Digital Service’s UI Elements
- Code for America’s Chime Styleguide
- Pivotal Labs Component Library
A few parts of this project are not in the public domain. Attribution and licensing information for those parts are described in detail in LICENSE.md.
The rest of this project is in the worldwide public domain, released under the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.
All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication alongside the public domain portions of this project. For more information, see CONTRIBUTING.md.