Mission patches are a way of celebrating success or a work milestone. They've been a GDS tradition from the start and have been produced for specific teams, achievements, anniversaries and general cultural reminders.
I've built up a little collection over the years and thought it was worth highlighting a few.
If you're unfamiliar with mission patches, you should read Metaphors we sticker by by the late great Vicki Teinaki, which says it all better than I could. Even if you know about mission patches, it's still worth a read.
Template consolidation
This is a mission patch from my first team. Our work was to try to reduce code and repetition by merging the rendering of page templates across GOV.UK. I was still getting up to speed with all things GDS but looking back I can see the huge value this work had (and unfortunately all of the work still to do). I don't remember specifics, but I think we managed to consolidate the code for forty-something page types into other pages.
Step by step
I was temporarily loaned out to the Modelling services team not long after and ended up staying with for several quarters. We built Step by step navigation on GOV.UK. It was my first taste of proper multi disciplinary work at GDS and I learned a lot from the experience. Multiple mission patches were produced at different stages of the project.
You can read more about the work in this GDS blog post Building a better GOV.UK, step by step. Step by step journeys also won a D&AD award for design, and there's a really good video in their archive about it.
GOV.UK birthdays
We used to have a small party each year to celebrate GOV.UK's birthday (1st February 2012, apparently) and sometimes that included mission patches. I wasn't there for all of them, but I've managed to collect a few.
Coronavirus
You might think that making stickers during the pandemic wasn't a good use of time, but I think it's the perfect example of a moment where hard work and achievement should be recognised and celebrated. If you want to know more about what went into that work, there's a really good blog post about it titled 2 Years of COVID-19 on GOV.UK.
Miscellaneous
Other mission patches have been produced at various times for various things. I collected these from a random pile that were being given away.
The first is for the Inside GOV.UK blog, which I've probably contributed to (there's various different blog areas). The star in the middle is another gold shiny one that hasn't scanned well, for doing something impressive on 2nd line support. I didn't earn it for anything specific, but I've been on 2nd line plenty of times. The final one is for GOV.UK Search, which I think was produced after I left the team.
Here's some more links about mission patches at GDS, if you're interested.