Intelligence Community Design System

Our Design System helps MI6, MI5 and GCHQ to create powerful and accessible capabilities that keep the UK and its partners safe and prosperous.

Due to the unique requirements of these companies, it was easier for us to create our own personal systems instead of implementing one already created.

We needed both flexibility and solid accessibility to unlock efficiencies at speed.

Our Design System also means that everyone has a way to contribute to our shared missions. We can design capabilities that can be used in multiple scenarios and help our teams and partners get the best experience possible.

Building our own Design System and UI Kit allows our teams and partners to join us on this journey. It’s key for our growth, to ensure that our partners have a deep understanding of accessibility and good design practice. We need teams to understand the value of consistent, usable and accessible design.

To achieve this across departments, platforms, technologies and skill level requires a collaborative and community-driven approach.

Faster capability development benefits everyone. The Design System has already proven that we can simultaneously speed up and improve the quality of what we build. We design reusable pieces of code that other teams can duplicate and adapt for their own projects.

This means the community and assets we adopt can better serve our fast-changing mission needs and we can be confident in them being accessible.

The complexity of the capabilities in use is high and user needs are often open-ended and require a high level of skill. The key value delivered by our Design System is repeatable patterns across a huge number of diverse but interconnected systems.

Inclusion and accessibility are core to our Design System. We’ve put a lot of effort into the atomic design components (such as typography and buttons) to instil confidence in the control of our ecosystem as we learn more about the vast use cases we encounter.

We’re interested to see the future of our work and where it can go now, sharing it with more and more people. Open sourcing will be a big step, and opportunity, for MI6, MI5 and GCHQ.

We hope our system can support your efforts in improving accessibility and usability of complex government, enterprise and specialist technology.

We hope our Design System will continue to evolve and we are looking forward to new improvements within the System!

- The IC Design System team from MI6, MI5, GCHQ and partners.