Update the crown

[stevenjmesser]

What

Update all relevant elements, repos and other resources that use GOV.UK Frontend, or are resources that the Design System supports. with the new crown.

Why

Taken from guidance provided by Government Communication Service:

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III, there have been changes to the symbols used to represent the state.

The College of Arms will be preparing a new rendering of the entire royal coat of arms. No action should be taken at this stage in the use of the coat of arms.

Organisations should consider the following principles when deciding to introduce any new symbol of state:

• Adopt a low-cost approach to implementation, avoiding wastage wherever possible
• Begin by changing digital versions, where there is no or low associated cost
• Physical depictions of the royal crown or cypher should only be changed at no or low cost or if truly necessary

The Cabinet Office is not placing a timeline on when symbols should be changed; it is for organisations to make decisions based on the above principles.

It is important to obtain authorisation before using any symbols of the state.

Who needs to work on this

Interaction designer, developer.

Who needs to review this

Product manager, interaction designer, lead frontend developer, accessibility specialist.

Done when

Preview Give feedback

1. Work out where we need to update the crown in GOV.UK Frontend #4057
   +0
   

   
2. Decide how to release the crown #4174
   +0
   
3. Decide how much we want to change the favicon #4175
   +0
   
4. Create the assets for the crown #4058
   13 of 13
   +0
   
5. Use SVG lockup for GOV.UK in header #1739
   breaking change header +2
   
6. Implement the new crown assets in Frontend (v3) #4407
   4 of 4
   breaking change design header page template +4
   
7. Implement the new crown assets in Frontend (v4) #4179
   4 of 4
   breaking change design header page template +4
   
8. Implement 'transitional' crown assets in Frontend (v5.0) #4440
   4 of 4
   breaking change header +2
   
9. Implement the new crown assets in Frontend (v5.x) #4178
   4 of 4
   breaking change design header page template +4
   
10. Remove legacy crown assets from Frontend (v6.0) #4441
    0 of 3
    breaking change header +2
11. Ask GOV.UK DG and GCS for comms lines for announcing and explaining the change #4059
    +0
    
12. Create new assets for non-GOV.‌UK Frontend resources #4105
    design +1
    
13. Ask teams not to update crown before 19 Feb 2024 #4620
    +0
14. After 19 February 2024, encourage teams to update crown before 1 March 2024 #4621
    +0
15. MVP guidance updates for new crown logo govuk-design-system#3423
    +0

[stevenjmesser]

Will scope this with @36degrees and @christopherthomasdesign next week.

[paulrobertlloyd]

Oh, I was wondering if such a change was going to happen. Is there a plan to update the Royal Coat of Arms in the footer too, as that also uses St. Edward's crown.

Related question: does the Royal Coat of Arms need to be in the footer at all?

[paulrobertlloyd]

Sorry, missed this part:

The College of Arms will be preparing a new rendering of the entire royal coat of arms. No action should be taken at this stage in the use of the coat of arms.

Still be curious about the needs around including the arms, and whether the need relates to Crown Copyright.

[querkmachine]

Questions we still need to answer (from memory, feel free to add).

In my mind, it's a given that we want to update the crown assets in v4 and v5, for both the one in the header and in favicon/sharing graphics.

• What versions of Frontend do we want to do a release for?
• Should the crown graphic in the header be behind a feature flag?
  • If so, should that feature flag be turned on by default for v5.x?
• Should we change what favicon/sharing image formats we ship with frontend to make use of manifest files and (potentially) remove older formats (e.g. Windows 8 tile icons)?
  • If so, should the changes to favicons/sharing images be included in pre-v5.x versions?
  • If so, should they be feature flagged?
• Do we want to produce a new graphic lockup that incorporates the GOV.UK text into it?
  • If so, what versions of Frontend do we do this for?
  • If so, How might we need to change the 'product name' option to accommodate a new lockup?
• Regarding the SVG: Do we want it 'flattened' to a single path so that teams cannot easily modify or break it (purposefully or by accident), or use a symbol-based approach that produces a smaller file size?
• Which crown should be used on the Design System examples during the transition period?

We also have some general questions around the 'how' of feature flags, documented in #4086.

[stevenjmesser]

Sorry, missed this part:

The College of Arms will be preparing a new rendering of the entire royal coat of arms. No action should be taken at this stage in the use of the coat of arms.

Still be curious about the needs around including the arms, and whether the need relates to Crown Copyright.

That might be answered by the latest newsletter from the College of Arms or their news about the cypher of King Charles III.

[paulrobertlloyd]

Not sure it is… and in fact my query is unrelated to who might be the current monarch and the particular design of their Royal Coat of Arms!

I’m more curious as to the needs for showing the arms is; is it a requirement of all government communications, does it relate to the Crown Copyright statement below (and again is pairing the 2 a requirement) or does it exist to reassure the public that this is an official government website…

Really am wondering if there’s an opportunity to remove the Royal Coat of Arms image entirely.

[stevenjmesser]

Not sure it is… and in fact my query is unrelated to who might be the current monarch and the particular design of their Royal Coat of Arms!

I’m more curious as to the needs for showing the arms is; is it a requirement of all government communications, does it relate to the Crown Copyright statement below (and again is pairing the 2 a requirement) or does it exist to reassure the public that this is an official government website…

Really am wondering if there’s an opportunity to remove the Royal Coat of Arms image entirely.

I'm not sure on the reasoning or the history of decisions off the top of my head, it's one I could look into if important. What are the reasons for removing the Royal Coat of Arms?

[paulrobertlloyd]

What are the reasons for removing the Royal Coat of Arms?

Brace yourself, I have a few! All minor, but perhaps greater in total than the sum…

What value does displaying the Royal Coat of Arms in the footer provide?

Let’s start with user needs. What are they in relation to this design element? Does it provide reassurance that GOV.UK is an official communications channel? If that was the case in 2012, is it still true today? Perhaps such reassurance is already conveyed by the GOV.UK brand in the header? That it is shown in the footer perhaps gives some indication to its importance!

Performance

In #3873, @querkmachine was concerned about the performance overhead of serving a bitmap graphic to users. That was in relation to replacing the 2 separate images needed for different pixel densities with one, but there’s no greater performance gain than not serving an asset in the first place!

Fewer hard coded elements within the footer

There are a few hard-coded elements in govukFooter that are not always relevant to service teams. The first is the OGL licence; this often makes little sense on transactional services with little or no guidance. I have removed this in the past (see Apply for teacher training).

The second is the Royal Coat of Arms. Having this present reduces the amount of space available for navigation or contact information (see Submit social housing lettings and sales data).

Relevance to a service/organisation

For internal services, executive agencies or arms-lengths bodies, showing the Royal Coat of Arms may make even less sense. For example:

• Ofqal’s Register of Regulated Qualifications service replaces the arms with their own logo and that of another organisation, CEA.
• The NHS Design System, forked from the GOV.UK Design System, forgoes the arms in their footer.
• The Home Office Design System doesn’t show the arms in their footer. Different code base, sure, but it shares a similar design which hopefully proves the broader need.

For other bodies adopting GOV.UK Frontend (local councils, other public sector bodies), the footer often needs to be adapted or replaced given these fixed elements, not least to remove the coat of arms.

Maintenance cost

Finally, the coat of arms comes with a small amount of maintenance overhead. It’s the only bitmap graphic provided by GOV.UK Frontend as it is too complex to serve as an SVG.

Currently 2 separate images are required, as well as a Sass mixin to account for serving these to users with different screen resolutions. (Again, see #3873)

And, on the occasion when the Royal Coat of Arms changes (hopefully not again for a few more years), it is yet another asset that needs to be updated and potentially back ported etc.

---

I guess my underlying point here is that, if the time has come when the Royal Coat of Arms in the footer component needs to be replaced, a very sensible, welcome and easier option may be to remove it entirely.

[stevenjmesser]

Thanks @paulrobertlloyd. Do you have recommendations for adding guidance about licensing and copyright choices to the docs for teams? If we provide options, we should explain the options and what they mean.

Also, how much effort is it for service teams to remove the Crown copyright notice? We have to weigh that up against other time-saving, effort-reducing changes we could make.

[querkmachine]

I think we're at the point where we want to switch tack to the modified release plan mentioned in this comment, as we still don't have a concrete go-live for the new crown and v5 is speeding towards release readiness.

I'm going to add and update some issues to accommodate it.

[querkmachine]

Does this need moving out of the 4.8 milestone? It has some things that extend well beyond the life of that particular release.

[36degrees]

The only thing that remains in this epic is cleanup we can't do until v6.0. I don't think it's useful to keep this issue open just because for that, especially as we'll track it with the v6.0 milestone, so I'm going to call this done.