Design tokens

The Design Tokens section provides information about the visual language and styles used on VA Clinical interfaces.

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A consistent experience

In order to maintain a cohesive user experience across the Clinical interfaces, it is imperative that design choices are applied thoughtfully and consistently as clinicians navigate across products and services.

Use the VACDS color tokens, and avoid custom colors whenever possible. Creating coherent clinical government sites, apps, and services helps provide a good user experience to clinicians. Of course, your mission, project needs, and user needs always come first, but if you plan to contribute your work back into the system — which helps the system learn, adapt, and improve — that work will need to conform to system standards and use VACDS design tokens.

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Accessibility

While this guide will always provide accessible samples and usage guidelines, it is still possible to create inaccessible designs using the components and utilities available. Always remember that the audience using Clinical interfaces may not be visual users, may experience color blindness or have difficulty handling low contrast ratios. Never use color alone as an affordance, always allow users to control automated content, and provide alternative navigation options.

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To get started on using design tokens, you will need to install the VACDS core package.

Learn how to get started