PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE GUIDELINES ARE OUTDATED AND NOT SUPPORTED ANYMORE.
A NEW VERSION IS EXPECTED BY 1th OF JULY 2023.
Swiss Confederation Web Guidelines
Summary
The Confederation Web Guidelines define the design specifications for the presentation of the Swiss Federal Administration on the Internet and are binding for all websites within the domain admin.ch. These guidelines specify how the websites of the Federal authorities have to look and how they should behave. At the same time they give the government departments and public offices the necessary flexibility to be able to optimize their online communications to the requirements of their specific business purposes.
These design regulations allow web designers to create up-to-date, user-friendly and universally accessible websites. They define the compulsory corporate design elements as well as the obligatory navigation and content modules. Furthermore, they introduce a series of elements that can be used directly and, if required, expanded upon or further developed. The display presentation has been optimized for web browsers on both desktop computers and laptops as well as on tablets and smartphones.
The Confederation Web Guidelines are aimed at both internal Federal project managers and third party service providers. They offer project managers an overview of the design specifications. Developer teams can use the templates and elements directly. They have been created using standard HTML code (as of 2013) and can be used with CSS and JavaScript style sheets.
The design specifications described for use on the Internet or in intranets can also be used for other digital channels, such as for the creation of apps.
Installation
Recommended: Install with NPM (more details):
$ npm install swiss-styleguide --save-dev
Install with Bower:
$ bower install swiss-styleguide
Use the provided build. Download the latest release as an archive.
Frutiger
The Confederation Web Guidelines should come with Frutiger as the main font. But due to licence restrictions, the font files cannot be distributed on this repository.
A copy can be obtained on the federal chancellery intranet or directly requested per email: [email protected]. The font files then have to be copied into the src/assets/fonts directory.
According to the Frutiger licence, the font files have to be protected. Each project should ensure that only allowed domains have access the font. The proposed solution is to check that the REFERER http header is present and contains the project's domain.
Contribution
If you want to contribute, fix a bug or suggest a new feature, please first create a new issue, so we can discuss it. Then, please make a Pull Request to the dev branch. This is important, as we use the Git Flow workflow. We thank you in advance for your collaboration!
Project setup on OSX/Unix/Windows
We use Gulp.js to run tasks and build our styleguide with Fabricator. Those depends on Node.js, be sure itโs installed before going further.
Install all the required dependencies, build the styleguide and start the server:
$ npm install && bower install
$ npm start
Browser-sync is automatically set up and will allow you to make changes and see them in real time.
Build the styleguide
Run the default Gulp task:
$ gulp
Run Gulp during development process (with watch tasks and browser-sync):
$ gulp serve
FAQ
Grid System
The grid system works exactly the same way as Bootstrap, no changes were made. Please refer to their documentation for more details.
Print classes
You can add print specific classes by using the ones Bootstrap made.
Classes available: .visible-print-block, .visible-print-inline, .visible-print-inline-block, .hidden-print.
Please refer to their documentation for more details.
Known issues
@font-face + Cache-Control/Pragma:
There is a known issue with Internet Explorer when loading the page over HTTPS with Cache-Control or Pragma headers set. Disable cache control on fonts to fix it (refer to issue #359 for more information):
<FilesMatch "\.(eot|otf|woff|ttf)$">
Header unset Cache-Control
Header unset Pragma
</FilesMatch>