Uploaded May 2017 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Thank you to Mozilla for making video recording possible.
It’s not often you get to build The Nation’s Bootstrap.
It’s easy to see what goes wrong when you build out thousands of websites without a style guide. There are over 2,200 Australian Government websites and they all have their own… character.
But what if someone gave you the job of fixing it? How would you even start? What is a style guide anyway? Does it include coding standards or just CSS? BEM or Atomic CSS? Does everything have to work in IE8? What about screen readers? And what about doing it completely in the open, when everyone’s watching intently?
Somebody gave me that job - along with a crack team of designers, developers, content writers and user researchers. In less than 3 months we put a working CSS framework and design guide in the hands of real humans building real sites.
This is how we did it.
Thank you to Mozilla for making video recording possible.
It’s not often you get to build The Nation’s Bootstrap.
It’s easy to see what goes wrong when you build out thousands of websites without a style guide. There are over 2,200 Australian Government websites and they all have their own… character.
But what if someone gave you the job of fixing it? How would you even start? What is a style guide anyway? Does it include coding standards or just CSS? BEM or Atomic CSS? Does everything have to work in IE8? What about screen readers? And what about doing it completely in the open, when everyone’s watching intently?
Somebody gave me that job - along with a crack team of designers, developers, content writers and user researchers. In less than 3 months we put a working CSS framework and design guide in the hands of real humans building real sites.
This is how we did it.
