Updating GOV.UK’s crown – Inside GOV.UK

As of as we speak, GOV.UK has a brand new crown in its emblem. This weblog put up explains why we’ve made the change and the way we’ve finished it.
Why the crown has modified

In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher options the Tudor Crown, relatively than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.
On every accession, the monarch will select a Royal Cypher, or image to signify their private authority. You’ll be able to see the Royal Cypher in many places, for instance put up containers, on police and army uniforms or on the facet of official buildings.
Types of the crown are being progressively up to date throughout authorities to mirror the monarch’s selection of crown, featured in His Majesty’s Royal Cypher. This consists of GOV.UK, the digital house of the federal government, which is a massively vital a part of public life within the UK. The GOV.UK crown is one in all many official cases of the crown so it types one a part of this alteration. For this work, we’re specializing in cases of the GOV.UK emblem which don’t embody the Royal coat of arms or authorities departments’ crests.
How the crown has modified
We wished to create one thing that was trustworthy to each the official heraldry and the visible id of GOV.UK. We redrew a simplified model of the crown, ensuring it appeared clearly at smaller sizes and decrease resolutions. The totally different proportions of the brand new crown meant we needed to subtly tweak the GOV.UK emblem’s typography and spacing to enrich it.
We labored with the Authorities Communication Service (GCS) and the Royal Family to substantiate the ultimate model.
Rolling out the brand new crown
GOV.UK’s crown is a crucial a part of GOV.UK’s model, which is without doubt one of the most recognisable digital providers within the UK according to YouGov. It has not been up to date because the website went reside in 2012, so we needed to work out the way to implement this alteration in a constant and ordered means.
As soon as we had the brand new designs, we wanted to roll it out throughout GDS-owned cases of the GOV.UK crown. This included the GOV.UK homepage, the sitewide menubar, and GDS owned apps, just like the Id Checker App.
Nonetheless, this alteration is a cross-government effort. Though GOV.UK appears to be like like a single factor to customers, it’s made up of a number of totally different web site domains, that are owned by numerous authorities departments. These departments are required to replace the crown of their domestically owned providers and channels.
The GOV.UK Design System makes it potential to do that in a constant means by way of its centralised open-source codebase, GOV.UK Frontend. The Design System crew up to date the crown in variations 5.1, 4.8 and three.15, to be sure that providers utilizing older variations of GOV.UK Frontend can replace it as simply as potential.
We’re taking a phased strategy to implementation, beginning with the sitewide menu bar and homepage, and seeing it rolled out throughout GOV.UK within the subsequent 2 weeks.
It’s reside

With big thanks to groups throughout authorities, as we speak is when the brand new crown is seen for the primary time throughout GOV.UK.
It first went reside on the GOV.UK homepage and within the sitewide menu bar. You may also see it in different GOV.UK domains comparable to marketing campaign.gov.uk and weblog.gov.uk.
Departments are making modifications to their providers between as we speak and 1 March. Throughout this time, customers might even see each new and outdated variations of the crown.
We additionally need to thank GCS for his or her help and for main the broader modifications to symbols of state; thanks.
When you want help
When you’re from a authorities division you may get help to replace to the latest version of the Design System. You may also ask any questions on to the Design System Workforce on:
If you need the brand in a picture file for inner cases of the GOV.UK crown, please electronic mail govuk-design-system-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.