NL Design System (NLDS) - Netherlands

What NLDS is

NL Design System makes accessible, inclusive, and user-friendly components, guidelines, and patterns for designers, developers, managers and more. NL Design System is a project that allows specialists from various (government) organizations to collaborate on specific solutions for websites and applications. Think of code, design, patterns and guidelines.

The goal: organizations need to reinvent the wheel less often. This makes online (government) environments more consistent, user-friendly, and accessible.

More than just design

A design system collects reusable components to achieve specific goals. The Design System collects many different aspects of design and development to make life easier:

• Guidelines on how to create the best digital services, such as for creating forms.
• Design kit for graphic designers and UX designers.
• Component library for developers.
• Shared insights on accessibility, included in those guidelines and in documentation for components.
• A method to apply your branding to our components (design tokens).
• Technical infrastructure to test, share, and roll out work efficiently (such as a sample repository with Storybook and visual regression tests).
• Style guide to consistently use your organization's branding.

So the Design System collects more than just design. All these components share this common goal: making consistent, accessible, and user-friendly websites and applications easily.

Accessibility

NL Design System currently helps in two ways with the accessibility tasks of organizations:

• The guidelines can be used as a knowledge base. They contain concrete advice on what is needed and why. There are do's and don'ts, explanations of the WCAG criteria, and tips that go beyond the WCAG.
• The components can be used to create accessible products. If components have reached the final stage (Hall of Fame), The Design System Team even guarantees that they meet accessibility requirements and have been tested in production.

The NL design System is a live environment that uses Github and allows everyone to contribute. They also organize regular events and open days.

The NL design System website is built in Github. There is also a list of websites that apply the NL Design System. 

Disclaimer:
Accessible EU is not responsible for the accessibility of content provided by third parties.