GOV.UK wins Design of the Year

GOV.UK won the Design Museum's Design of the Year. This is brilliant news. The judges recognised that the simplicity of the visual, information and content design could have a positive impact on many peoples' lives when interacting with the complexity of government. Exactly what we set out to achieve back in February 2011.

My cousin was quick to point out that I was the project manager and therefore this had nothing to do with me. Whilst the design team rightly feel chuffed by this award, it was a coming together of a talented, multidisciplinary team that made this possible. As the second member to join the team that built the alpha I recognise the evolution of the design rules into the product today. Tom gives a good summary of the journey and some of the artefacts that went into GOV.UK.

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• Storify of press and coverages

GOV.UK gets a mention in the budget

Oooh, the GOV.UK project got a mention in this year's budget (on page 47).

We will transform the quality of digital public services by committing that from 2014 new online services will only go live if the responsible minister can demonstrate that they themselves can use the service successfully. The Government will also ensure that all information is published on a single ’gov.uk’ domain name by the end of 2012 and will move to a ‘digital by default’ approach to its transactional services by 2015.

I love the bit about Ministers eating their own dogfood.

Better crack on with all that then!