Made in Figma: The National Park Service Goes From Paper to Pixels | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

The National Park Service turned decades of printed visitor guides into a unified digital app serving 431 parks and monuments. GuideOne and Twohy Design Works drew on Massimo Vignelli’s 1977 Unigrid system to create a flexible interface that could accommodate diverse park data, long-term government use, and varied accessibility needs. Figma helped the NPS, designers, and developers collaborate on a practical design system that works for both visitors and park staff.

A Digital System for 431 Parks

• The NPS manages an unusually diverse collection of sites, ranging from major national parks to small historic memorials.
• Each park controls much of its own data and writes its own content, making consolidation difficult.
• The app needed to bring inconsistent information into one reliable system.
• It includes:
  • Interactive maps
  • Self-guided tours
  • Essential visitor information
  • Content useful to both the public and NPS employees
• The app launched in 2021 after the NPS moved from separate apps for individual parks to a single consolidated experience.

Designing for Durability and Accessibility

• Government software must remain useful for many years rather than follow short-lived product trends.
• The app serves people with widely different accessibility requirements.
• Designers had to balance a consistent national system with the individual character and needs of each park.
• Collaboration between the NPS, GuideOne’s developers, and designers helped ensure concepts were feasible with the available data and engineering resources.

Adapting the Unigrid

• Before 1977, NPS brochures varied widely in format and visual style.
• Massimo Vignelli’s Unigrid standardized:
  • Graphic components
  • Layout structures
  • Typography and visual hierarchy
  • Print-production methods
• The system gave the NPS a recognizable identity while allowing individual parks to present their own stories.
• GuideOne and Twohy Design Works treated Unigrid as a foundation for the app rather than copying the brochures directly.
• The challenge was translating a print-based grid and editorial system into interactive screens, maps, and digital navigation.

Figma as a Collaboration Tool

• Figma made it easy to circulate designs among the NPS, designers, and engineering teams.
• Shared prototypes exposed practical constraints around park data and implementation.
• The workflow supported ongoing feedback instead of separating design from development.
• This helped turn a historical visual system into a robust digital product.

The project demonstrates how a well-established design system can be modernized without losing its identity. For complex public platforms, combining strong historical principles with collaborative prototyping, flexible data structures, and accessibility-focused design can produce a product that remains useful across many users and locations.