Grand One is Finland’s largest annual competition for digital media jobs. The winners were announced at the Grand One Gala on March 30, 2023. Gofore has been planning and implementing the winning work of the Best Design System series, the Helsinki Design System.
Design System is a collection of user interface components, standards, and elements that are reusable in various digital services and whose purpose is to manage, unify and facilitate design. There are 17 series in the Grand One competition.
Helsinki Design System
For the first time, the Best Design System title was awarded to the City of Helsinki. Helsinki Design System is a design and development tool that supports the ease of use, accessibility, and uniform appearance of the city’s digital services and platforms. The creators of the services can focus on identifying customer needs and improving the customer experience since they don’t have to do all the functionality themselves from scratch. Helsinki Design System is open source code and available for free use by everyone.
Helsinki Design System is produced as a multi-professional collaboration with different suppliers. It was designed by Gofore and Nitor and, in addition to Gofore, it was implemented by HiQ, Kodan, Nitor, Siteimprove, Solita, Finnish software development OSK and Unicus.
Grand One competition
Grand One is a competition for Finnish digital media work. There are 17 series in the competition. The work entered in the competition must be designed mainly in Finland, but the production may have been done abroad. The exceptions are the Best Implementation and Most Innovative Use of Technology categories, for which the works entered must also have been produced in Finland.
Gofore also competed in the Best Design System series with the Suomi.fi Design System designed and created for the Digital and Population Data Services Agency, which is part of the everyday life of everyone living in Finland. Its goal is to ensure a uniform, accessible, and high-quality user experience of national-level public digital services, regardless of the agency behind the service. Its components have been used to implement a number of citizen transaction services, from making a notice of move to strong identification and everything in between. At the same time, a considerable amount of tax money has been saved, as each agency and service has not tried to create its own electronic transaction experience from scratch, but has been able to utilize pre-planned and functionally tested elements.
The Suomi.fi Design System has been made accessible and open to everyone from the beginning. Its mission is to contribute to the advancement of the digitalization of public administration and the accessibility of services by solving usability challenges on behalf of several actors and sharing the solutions openly for everyone to use.