Aksel

Aksel is Nav’s design system, a shared platform for product owners, designers, and developers. The goal is simple: make it easier to work with product development at Nav, so that the user experience improves. A system like this needs an identity that is recognisable, flexible, and durable over time. One that can grow with the mission and the organisation.

This was a collaborative effort across the whole Aksel team, the kind of work that only happens when designers, developers, and product people pull in the same direction.

Identity platform

The work began by defining who Aksel is.

• Personality: friendly, young and innovative, playful and accessible.
• Values: living, trust-building, and unifying.
• Audience: product owners, designers, and developers at Nav.

In a positioning map we placed Aksel towards the bold and dynamic, in the company of systems like Google Material Design and Microsoft Fluent, and deliberately away from the more conventional, cautious position public sector design systems tend to land in.

Naming
The name Aksel was chosen because it landed on all the values.

A wheel axle sits at the centre of a hub (nav in Norwegian) - Unifying. Acceleration and rotation evoke speed and movement - Living.

And as a proper name rather than a concept word like “the toolbox,” it had room to stand on its own and be filled with meaning over time. Short, easy to say, easy to remember.

DNA: facets and connections
The core of the visual identity is a simple observation: digital product development at Nav is many-faceted, and at times hard to navigate.

It became a visual language built on facets and connections. The cube as the base unit, assembled from faces and lines. A cube can be made of several cubes; many cubes can be combined into constructions. The result is a system that holds both the complexity of the work and the simplicity it strives towards.

From cube to symbol
The logo symbol is distilled from the cube itself. Its upper edges, the top point and the two diagonals form an arrow pointing up and forward.

The symbol isn’t placed on top of the concept but drawn out of it: the same visual language that runs through the surfaces, condensed into a single mark. And within the same form sits an “A” for Aksel, so that name and symbol resolve into one.

Graphic element
To make Aksel recognisable even without the logo or name, we built a graphic element on the same DNA. The base form is the cube, six faces that can be slid apart, scaled, and rotated. From a handful of rules comes an almost endless set of compositions that still share one visual language.

The element always sits on a coloured surface and breaks off the format on at least one side, so it feels dynamic rather than framed. Lines that meet should either align or keep a clear distance and the line must always have enough contrast to read clearly.

Aksel has grown into one of Norway’s leading design systems for digital product development. It has also been a source of inspiration for other public sector actors, including Digdir’s national design system.