AcademywebinarNLDesign: the NL Design System as a drop-in Nextcloud theme

NLDesign: the NL Design System as a drop-in Nextcloud theme

A walk-through of NLDesign, which brings the official NL Design System tokens into Nextcloud. Pick your organisation's house style from a list of pre-built themes, fine-tune tokens in the editor, and every Conduction app picks it up without being branded separately.

WebinarNLDesignNL Design SystemThemingAccessibilityDesign tokens

Conduction·2 augustus 20262 min read

Government interfaces are supposed to look and behave a particular way, and building that yourself is a front-end project nobody asked for. NLDesign makes it an install. The full recording is above.

What we covered

What the NL Design System actually specifies — type scale, colour, spacing, radii, focus states — and why NLDesign ships the published tokens from design.nl rather than a Conduction interpretation
Picking a house style: Rijkshuisstijl, Gemeente Utrecht, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam, and a broad set of community-maintained municipality and organisation brands, selected from the admin settings panel
Accessibility by default: contrast ratios, focus rings and keyboard paths that hold up to WCAG AA and the Tijdelijke wet digitale toegankelijkheid
The token editor — fine-tuning individual colours and exporting the customisation to a file you can share across instances
Theme-switchable iconography: the icon pack an app resolves travels with the active design system, so a French-government theme serves DSFR while a Dutch-government theme serves the RVO, OpenGemeenten and Den Haag packs
Why every Conduction app picks the theme up for free — the CSS-token discipline, and what breaks when a component hardcodes a colour
Per-app theming exclusion, for the cases where you want one app left alone
Audience Q&A on fonts, custom brands, and keeping up with NLDS releases