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.

We’ve built our own Design System because of our unique requirements. We needed both flexibility and solid accessibility to unlock efficiencies at speed.

We’re passionate about making sure that everyone can contribute equitably to our shared missions. We believe our Design System is the best way to help our teams and partners do that.

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 that they 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 required 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. This means the community and assets we adopt can better serve our fast-changing mission needs and we are confident on them being accessible.

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

Inclusion and accessibility is core to our Design System. We’ve put a lot of effort into the atomic design components (typography, buttons). We decided this 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 potential of our work and where it can go now, sharing it with more and more people. Open sourcing is a big step, and opportunity, for MI6, MI5, and GCHQ.

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

We want our Design System to continue to evolve and we’re excited to see what happens next.

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