Design System .italia
Building the foundation for a consistent, accessible, and scalable Italian public administration
Design System .italia is the official design system for Italian public administration websites and digital services. As part of the team at the Italian Department for Digital Transformation, I contributed to defining components, patterns, guidelines, and the overall design language used by thousands of public institutions across the country.
The challenge
Italy’s public administration is a complex ecosystem: thousands of institutions, each with different budgets, technical capabilities, and design maturity. The goal of Design System .italia was to provide a shared foundation that any public body could adopt — from a small municipality to a national ministry.
The challenge wasn’t purely technical. It required balancing the needs of highly diverse stakeholders, ensuring that components worked for both small teams with no design resources and large agencies with established processes.
What I worked on
UI Kit Italia
I contributed to the design and maintenance of UI Kit Italia, the official Figma library that maps to the Bootstrap Italia front-end framework. This meant keeping design and code in sync, documenting usage rules, and managing variants for components like navigation patterns, forms, cards, and alerts.
Component documentation
Each component required thorough documentation: when to use it, when not to, accessibility notes, and responsive behavior. I wrote and maintained guidelines that were published on designers.italia.it.
Accessibility
All components were designed and verified against WCAG 2.1 AA standards. This included color contrast ratios, keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility, and focus management — areas often neglected in traditional design system work.
Open source
Design System .italia is entirely open source. Contributing meant working in the open — coordinating with a distributed team, reviewing community contributions, and communicating design decisions transparently.
Outcome
The design system is now adopted by over 15,000 public administration websites. In 2024, the project was awarded the ADI Design Index Award, one of Italy’s most prestigious design recognitions.
The work is publicly available at designers.italia.it.