Webuniversum – Design System of the Flemish Government

The Challenge

When I joined Vlaanderen Digitaal in 2013, the assignment was focused: redesign the UI of vlaanderen.be, the official website of Flanders.

The brand guidelines we had to work with were built entirely for print. Yellow as the sole brand colour, typography rules that assumed paper, no digital interaction patterns. My job was translating those into something that could actually work on screen.

What started as a single website gradually became much more. As more government departments joined the platform, and later municipalities through Mijn Burgerprofiel, the need for a shared UI language grew with it. Over time, what had started as a UI redesign quietly evolved into the foundation of a government-wide design system — serving 750+ teams across websites, applications and citizen-facing services.

For most of that journey, there was no dedicated team. A small group of designers and developers contributed one to two days per week alongside other work. To put the scale in perspective: the Flemish government spans 9 ministers, 48 agencies and 300 municipalities — that's the ecosystem our design system needed to serve.

The Process

Design system work rarely announces itself. Most of the decisions that mattered happened quietly — in the gap between what the brand said and what the screen needed.

Translating print into digital

The brand offered one colour: yellow. It worked beautifully on posters and publications. Online it created immediate problems — yellow is too bright for interactive elements, and the brand's suggested supporting colour was grey, which sits too close to body text to carry any meaning.

I introduced a functional blue for all interactive elements. Blue is the web's established convention for interactivity, scores well on accessibility contrast requirements, and — in a government context where every colour risks a political reading — it was a colour we could argue as a neutral, functional choice. That decision was made in 2013. It's still part of Webuniversum today.

Colour was just one piece of the translation. I also defined how typography should behave across content-heavy pages, selected an icon set that remained legible at small screen sizes, adapted the logo for digital contexts, and established a basic layout language — all things the print guidelines hadn't anticipated and that needed to be built from scratch.

This kind of work was something I could approach with confidence because of my background in branding and UI design. I was used to interpreting what guidelines were trying to achieve, not just what they literally said — and filling the gaps they hadn't anticipated.

From project solutions to reusable patterns

Early components were often designed for one specific use case. They worked, but they didn't travel well. As more teams and products joined the platform, the cost of that specificity became clear — components that were too closed, too complex, too tied to their original context to be reused elsewhere.

The ongoing work became learning to abstract. Taking a solution that worked for vlaanderen.be and asking: what is the actual pattern here? What assumptions can we remove? What would make this useful beyond a content website — for a citizen-facing application like Mijn Burgerprofiel, for a CMS platform serving dozens of departments, for a municipal app used on mobile?

That shift — from designing screens to designing systems — is something I kept returning to throughout the project.

Accessibility as embedded craft

Because Webuniversum serves a government ecosystem, WCAG compliance was never optional. Working closely with an accessibility specialist over many years changed how I approach UI design fundamentally.

Accessibility stopped being a checklist and became a design constraint I worked with from the start — colour contrast, focus states, keyboard interaction, error handling, touch target sizes. The goal was that teams inheriting our components would inherit accessible behaviour as a starting point — a solid foundation they wouldn't have to build from scratch.

The Outcome

Over twelve years, Webuniversum grew from a UI redesign of a single government website into a design system serving 750+ teams across 250+ websites, 400+ applications and intranets, and citizen-facing platforms used by people across Flanders.

The numbers tell part of the story: 196 components, 450+ variants, 500+ releases. Weekly release cycles maintained consistently by a team that, for most of its existence, was working on this part-time.

The part the numbers don't capture is longevity. Design decisions made in 2013 — the interaction colour, the typographic approach, the foundational patterns — are still part of the system today. That's not inertia. It's what happens when foundational decisions are made carefully.

In 2025, for the first time in the project's history, budget was approved to hire a dedicated full-time designer and full-time developer. For a team that had operated on collective goodwill and part-time hours for a decade, that was a significant moment of institutional recognition.

For me personally, it was also a moment of reckoning. This project had been a constant in my working life for twelve years. I had structured other work around it, always ensuring I could keep that one day a week for Flanders. Letting go wasn't a simple decision — it took over a year to make it.

But with a full-time designer now taking ownership, continuing at one day a week no longer made sense. I decided it was time to hand it over properly. Leaving at that moment — when the system was finally properly resourced — felt like the right way to honour what we'd built.

If you think I can help you I'd love to hear from you.