Introduction

We created Aurora design system to standardize the visual language and user experience of the Digital Enablement Division’s online applications and tools.

Aurora was built by a multi-disciplinary team of developers, designers, UX researchers, writers and data scientists. Combining the expertise of all of these roles allowed us to create a design system with a wide range of elements.

Work for Aurora was done entirely in the open. We wanted to keep the spirit of government, while providing the quality and fun seen in the private sector.

Using Aurora is complementary to the Web Experience Toolkit (WET), Canada.ca Style Guide, the Federal Identity Policy (FiP) and WCAG 2.1.

Aurora is available for anyone who wants to use it!

What is a design system?

A design system is a catalogue of everything that makes up your digital product including user interface elements, writing style, guiding principles, coding standards, visual design, etc. using reusable components for easy development.

How to use

Every element in Aurora design system has a design component, code and documentation. By downloading the UI kit (for Adobe Illustrator) you have access to all of the components sketches in addition to the code provided on the site.

We recommend that while building a new product you begin by following the system as closely as possible, then you can adapt certain elements (i.e. colours, language style, icons) to suit your own product or brand.

Who can use this design system?

Aurora design system is open for anyone to use! It was originally created to help guide digital collaboration tools used within the Government of Canada, but the system can be adapted to create citizen-focused services or external digital products.

How to contribute

You can help us with the ongoing development of Aurora design system by contributing to our GitHub repository!

You can post comments with design or content suggestions via GitHub Issues.

Feel free to propose changes by creating Pull Requests. If you don't have write access, editing a file will create a Fork of this project for you to save your proposed changes to. Submitting a change to a file will write it to a new Branch in your Fork, so you can send a Pull Request. Members from our team will review the Pull Request and collaborate with you to include your contributions to Aurora.

If this is your first time contributing on GitHub, don't worry! You can learn how to use GitHub with their help documentation.