The Council Toolkit is a modular system designed to scale to meet the digital service requirements for Councils, but at its design core it employs and builds upon a standard design framework.
Council Toolkit is built on top of a number of systems and philosophies.
Responsive design is generally the best way to deliver a consistent experience across the wide (and ever-increasing) range of devices that your customers are using to access your services. Council Toolkit is built in a responsive, mobile-first way. Bootstrap's grid system allows you to quickly and easily add new components to your templates that will work well on almost any device.
The Toolkit itself is offered under a completely open, public domain licence. Use it to create prototypes, proofs of concept or full sites if you want to, without any complicated licences to deal with or money to pay. Just download and go for it. The other systems that the Toolkit is built on also have (varying) open licences to allow you to use them in your commercial or non-commercial projects.
Bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web. We built Council Toolkit on top of Bootstrap so you have a rock solid foundation to build from. Using Bootstrap also gives you access to a huge community of developers and content creators to help you when you need it.
Council Toolkit references Bootstrap from the offical Bootstrap CDN so you don't need to download any extra files.
Font Awesome gives you scalable vector icons that can instantly be customized - size, color, drop shadow, and anything that can be done with the power of CSS. Font Awesome has over 350 icons you can use in your project, to add to over 200 icons included in Bootstrap.
Font Awesome is also referenced from the CDN.
Council Toolkit uses Source Sans Pro and Open Sans, both served direct from Google Fonts. Both are open source and can be used in any of your projects.
Source Sans Pro is used for headings and was conceived primarily as a typeface for user interfaces and is well known for its clarity and legibility.
Open Sans is the typeface used for all other text. It is optimised for legibility and is available in a large number of weights and styles making it a good replacement for Verdana on screen.