Header is inconsistent with GOV.UK header

[christopherthomasdesign]

What

GOV.UK (as in the central website) recently shipped a new header as part of improvements to the site navigation. After a successful A/B test this has now gone live for all users.

It has a few stylistic inconsistencies with the header that services use, mostly the spacing and different states:

Basic Design System header used by services:

GOV.UK header:

We need to work with the GOV.UK team to work out the best way to align the two.

If we made a change to the header in the Design System, it would be a visually significant change, and would affect any teams that have written custom CSS for their header. Which means ideally any changes would be made as part of #2274.

Why

• so GOV.UK continues to look like one website
• so hover and focus states are treated consistently across GOV.UK and its services

Who needs to work on this

Designer, developer

Who needs to review this

Designer, developer

Done when

• Teams agreed on what needs to change and where
• Made a plan for implementing any changes to the header in Frontend or GOV.UK

[christopherthomasdesign]

Update: had conversation with designers on GOV.UK, agreed to change padding on the GOV.UK header to match that in the Design System one. No definite date on when this will happen yet.

[christopherthomasdesign]

The GOV.UK header has now been changed to reflect the spacing in the Design System version, so going to close this now