Digital Guidelines

The State of Colorado Digital Guidelines have been created to help agencies build a virtual #ColoradoForAll. Our living guidelines are a collaborative reference for creating a cohesive, accessible, and user-centered digital ecosystem. They are informed by four basic principles that should underpin every digital project, from PDF forms to websites and mobile apps. Our principles are based on the goals - and values - of inclusive design, transparent communication, performance optimization, and continuous improvement.

• Design For and With Real People: Use data and people's real needs to plot your design course, validate your efforts, and evolve.
• Put Accessibility First: We're not just talking about WCAG conformance here. Make inclusive design, plain language, responsiveness, and functional accessibility your priority.
• Keep it Simple (and Clear): Readability, navigability, and process clarity are critical. Make your design and content - and the services they support - as understandable as possible.
• Represent Colorado: Brand consistency helps us provide reliable, familiar, trustworthy, and high-quality experiences across the digital space.

What These Guidelines Are (and Are Not)

These guidelines are a work in progress. Your feedback is essential to helping us expand and improve on this resource, making it more comprehensive and valuable. We have a roadmap (check out Guideline History) that outlines our current goals and will update it, and this resource, based on your ideas and needs.

• This is not a rulebook. The guidelines are recommendations. They don't include or replace State technical standards and policies. They should not supersede agency-level policies or practices (but we sure hope agencies will be informed by them!). The guidelines are a tool. They are here to help you approach your digital projects in a way that puts users first and represents our brand.
• This is not a repository. We do provide some example CSS and SASS snippets to help you incorporate our recommendations into your projects. We do not provide custom forks of recommended design systems (like USWDS), installable themes, or other plug-and-play code collections. Agency and user needs, platforms, stacks, and virtually every building block of our digital world is variable. We want to respect - and support - that necessary diversity.
• This is not a comprehensive resource designed to address every need. This is a living document - updated regularly based on your feedback - that addresses the most common topics where brand and tech intersect. Most of the recommendations in this guide can be applied to almost any modern digital solution.

Design Tokens

Design tokens, like components, help to ensure that we are providing consistent, brand-compliant, and accessible experiences. If you use them, you'll be able to design and develop digital products more efficiently.

Explore Tokens

Components

The State of Colorado has adopted the USWDS as a foundation. Using USWDS will help us ensure that digital services created for or used by Coloradans are user-friendly, accessible, and consistent. When USWDS implementation is not possible or practical, agencies may choose to fallback to W3C Design System components and/or W3C APG patterns or use an alternative design strategy that conforms with the recommendations within the Design Guidelines.

Learn What to Use 

Visit Components for a guide to selecting your framework, customization guidelines, and more.

Common Components 

Accessibility & Experience

A lot of people think of digital accessibility as WCAG conformance. At the State, though, we must ensure that we are providing effective, accessible, and positive experiences. Doing so often requires thinking outside of the "success criteria box." Learn how to at Accessibility & Experience.

Content Strategy

Delivering information is easy. Delivering it in a way that is meaningful, valuable, and usable takes effort. Learn how to test, prioritize, and write your content in Content Strategy. 

Layout Guidelines

Whether you're designing a website from scratch or need to figure out how (or whether) to tie social media into your solution, the Layout Guidelines should help. 

Resources

Visit Resources to connect with support communities, learn about technology projects, and more. 

Get Involved

Learn how to join the working group or share your thoughts by visiting Get Involved.

Guideline History

Learn what's changed and what we hope to improve on in the future by exploring the Guideline History.