RFC 1: Add government department colours to components

[andysellick]

👉 Rendered version

[Davidslv]

There's one thing that comes to my mind, we are using the name of the departments to set their colours, when/if a department changes their name we have to come back and rename the css rules to a new name.

Question: wouldn't be better to give them the option to choose a colour that we already have rules for? E.g: Dropdown with green,brown, red, we would then have .green, .brown, .red css classes. This would require an extra field on the schema (which you mentioned already wasn't ideal) but wouldn't it be better than having to have a ticket to rename or change a department colour, or add a new one?

[andysellick]

@Davidslv that's a good point, if we had generic colour classes not tied to department names that would be simpler, and avoid duplication (some of the current colours are duplicated already).

We would need to change the mechanism by which the colours are delivered, which could be tricky - I think it's in use in more places than whitehall, so it would mean creating a new mechanism alongside the current one and having them running in parallel for a while, potentially. I'd be slightly concerned about the creation of tech debt there.

[vanitabarrett]

@andysellick I agree with @Davidslv - I think it makes a lot of sense to be using generic colour variables rather than tying them in with department names.

I'm not 100% sure of how this currently works and what this change would mean in terms of tech debt/how complicated it is to implement, but I think if it's a good solution then running 2 mechanisms in parallel for a while to get this working is a good trade-off, we just need to make sure we make a note of any tech debt to revisit.

[Davidslv]

Btw, I just want to give some heads up that this has been kinda of hardcoded in the backend, there's a class for the Organisations Brand Colour which is based on their name...

I hope we can try to take this entropy away if we can, please :)

alphagov/whitehall@d5cf054

[andysellick]

This is good feedback. Some brief thoughts.

• Doing it this way would definitely be more work, both for frontend and backend. That isn't necessarily a reason to not do it though.
• We'd need to have all or part of the class name in the content item, so that it could be passed to components. How much effort would it be to add this @Davidslv ?
• We'd need a naming convention for classes. .colour-FF0000 obviously isn't going to work, but I worry about getting into shades of different colours e.g. .colour-blue, .colour-light-blue, .colour-lighter-blue, particularly if other colours get introduced later. Any other alternatives?
• the basis for these colours currently is in the toolkit and pulled in by government-frontend, whitehall, govuk_prototype_kit, govuk_developer_docs and possibly by govuk_frontend_toolkit itself, so we'd need a plan for those at the end of such a change.

In terms of the RFC, if this change broadly fits in with the rest of the plan, does anyone have any other comments on any other part of it?

[tijmenb]

Do we need to be specific about the intention of the passed in variables?

So instead of:

<%= render 'govuk_publishing_components/components/title', link_colour: 'department-for-education', border_color: 'department-for-education' %>

Do this:

<%= render 'govuk_publishing_components/components/title', brand: 'department-for-education' %>

[andysellick]

Yeah, that's simpler.

[NickColley]

Could the designs of these pages be reviewed?

Is there a user need for these link styles?

Is there a way to avoid these odd pages while also retaining the department branding?

[tijmenb]

@NickColley those questions are out of scope for this RFC.

[NickColley]

@tijmenb I don't think it's unreasonable to approach problems like this from a design perspective, worth at least discussing this with designers, rather than building complex systems that could be avoided.

[NickColley]

Could consider theme or brand, for the namespace, to be consistent with @tijmenb 's suggestion.

[andysellick]

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I've made a decision and have opened a new PR with the changes. I've not implemented all the suggestions made here: if you disagree with the approach I'm happy to discuss further but please have a specific suggestion as to how your proposal could be implemented as I've got a lot to do this mission. Thanks!