Getting started for designers
USWDS offers a flexible yet coherent visual style you can apply to any government website. Our visual style offers a clean, modern aesthetic that meets high standards of usability and accessibility while promoting credibility and trust.
See the design tokens section for more on USWDS system styles and palettes.
As a complement to this visual style guidance, we strongly recommend you use 18F’s Content Guide when writing language for government services.
USWDS for designers
USWDS components and tokens are available in their application-specific project file formats. Download the assets and all associated fonts and images from the links below. Find more complete installation instructions at our USWDS for designers GitHub repo:
For some users, it can be easier to install the USWDS design kit for Figma directly from the Figma community instead of downloading the file from our GitHub repo.
Here on the USWDS documentation site, you’ll find HTML mockups of common UI components designed to follow USWDS’s visual style guide. To view the specs of each design live on the website (like padding, margins, stroke weight, line-height, and so on), use your browser’s developer tools.
Retired design files
USWDS no longer maintains the following design files. The most recent versions remain available for download at the links below. While USWDS is no longer maintaining these files, we’d love to hear from any teams that are using them and adding new components when new versions of USWDS are released. Send us an email.
1.6.10
1.0.0
Accessibility requirements
All of our designs meet the WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility guidelines and are compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. If you choose to customize these designs, please make sure they continue to meet the requirements listed in the “Accessibility” section of each design.
Contribution guidelines
We’re glad you’re considering contributing to USWDS — their success relies on contributions from designers like you.
Please visit our wiki to read our full contribution guidelines. Also, please note that every submission we receive goes through a full design review. (Changes that only affect underlying code are reviewed by our developers.)
Questions or comments? Email us and we’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.
Latest updates
Meaningful code and guidance updates are listed in the following table:
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| 2025-01-08 |
Added information about USWDS design kit for Figma. Added download link and direct link to file hosted on Figma community. Removed links to third-party Figma kits. More information: uswds-site#3041 |
| 2025-01-08 |
Updated information about USWDS design kit for Adobe XD. Noted that we have stopped maintaining these assets since XD is no longer supported by Adobe. More information: uswds-site#3041 |
