Politie.nl (concept)
A self initiated design study, not commissioned by and not affiliated with the Dutch police. The question behind it: what would politie.nl look like if the whole site were treated as one public register, and if the crisis moment were designed first instead of last? Every screen is a working prototype filled with sample content.
- Client
- Concept, self initiated
- Role
- Concept, design and build
- Year
- 2026
- Scope
- Concept, Art direction, Design system, Frontend development, Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AAA)
The story
The direction did not start in a design tool, it started with an AI assisted research pass. Seven sweeps covered international police and emergency services, public sector design systems, the crisis UX literature and the Dutch context, alongside a reconnaissance of the current politie.nl captured straight from its live DOM.
Out of that came one idea, called Het Register. Every atom on the site, a report, a case, a news item, a topic, is a numbered, dated and sourced line with the same field order and tabular figures. On top of it sits one louder and rare layer: the urgency grammar Direct, Urgent, Informatief. The distance between those two layers is the design.
Accessibility drove the grid rather than following it. Contrast is verified by a script in the repository instead of by eye, the type scale is built to reach the AAA ratios, and the layout column matches the 44 pixel target size, so a control that fits the grid is large enough by definition. The emergency band with 112 sits above the wordmark, which makes the first thing in the document the thing you need when it matters.
The screens
Dit is een zelfstandig ontwerp en geen officiële website van de Nederlandse politie.
