Designing for Beauty in Public Services

Last month, a new executive order - "America By Design" -  instructed federal agencies to build services that are both functional and beautiful.

For many leaders in government, the word “beauty” often gets reduced to aesthetics — fonts, color palettes, or page layouts. Those matter, but beauty in public services goes much deeper.

At Civilla, our vision is clear: we imagine a beautiful civil society for all. It’s a call we’ve been waking up on every day for more than a decade, and it’s work we care deeply about. 

Like art, “beauty” is hard to define. No one can agree on a single definition of what makes art beautiful. Yet when you encounter a painting, a song, or a piece of architecture that is beautiful, you feel it. It strikes you in a deeply human way.

We believe the same is true of public services. When a service is designed with beauty, people feel it. It changes how they experience government and whether they can trust it.

what beauty feels like

Through our work, Civilla has seen that beauty in public services is not a matter of aesthetics. Beauty in design is about how people feel when they experience government systems and programs. When services are designed well, people experience:

Being seen and respected
People feel recognized when a service meets them where they are. They feel respected when the design assumes they are capable and worthy of support. Feeling seen is the sense that the system was built with real people in mind. It is felt in the smallest details, from plain language to clear next steps. A beautiful service should signal that we thought of you.

Trust and safety
Beauty shows up as trust. People feel safe sharing their information, confident the system is on their side, and assured they won’t be penalized for telling the truth. Trust grows when the service does what it promises every time, without hidden catches or unexpected consequences.

Simplicity and ease
A beautiful service removes friction. It’s intuitive, seamless, and doesn’t bury people in unnecessary steps. When barriers fall away, people can get the services they need when they need them, so they can focus on their lives and goals instead of fighting the system. Ease shows up when the process fits people, rather than forcing them to bend around it.

Community and relationship
Public services are built and delivered by people — frontline staff inside institutions and community members on the outside. When designed well, services create conditions for those groups to work in relationship with one another, not in opposition. Community shows up when people feel supported by the system and by each other.

Dignity and harmony
At its best, beauty shows up when systems create the conditions for people to thrive. Beautiful systems acknowledge the dignity of every person regardless of their ability, background, or current situation. At Civilla, we imagine programs working together in harmony, sparing people from carrying the burden of navigating fragmented systems. 

why this matters for leaders today

There is no shortage of people and organizations advocating for building more efficient public services, and rightly so. Interactions with public institutions should be fast, easy, and simple. They should also feel beautiful. It may seem that, given the current state of many public services, we should settle for functional systems. But we can and should expect that public systems are also designed to create beautiful experiences. 

At Civilla, we have spent the last decade helping public institutions redesign public services to meet the needs of people who use them every day. Across this work, we’ve learned how beauty is not an add-on but an imperative.

As leaders, the challenge — and opportunity — is not simply to improve the look of services. It is to ask a deeper question: what do we want people to feel when they interact with us?

When a system is beautiful, when it feels designed to meet the needs of the individual, it communicates a degree of care and attention that can help rebuild trust in public institutions. Beautiful systems make government something people can partner with, rather than something they endure. That is the real promise of design in public institutions, and the real opportunity of this moment.