Table of contents

• Introduction
• What is a headless design system?
• How is headless design system different from traditional design system?
• How do I start a headless design system?
• Final words

est 13 min read

Introduction At Sitecore and Templafy, I was part of teams that successfully developed and delivered a headless design system, I am now sharing the insights and lessons learned from these two projects. Another lesson I shared was **Adopting design system in a organization.**

Our first challenge in both projects was how to create and scale a design system. We went headless way. I am writing this piece because I was asked many times from product people what “headless” means.

What is a headless design system?

From my experience working with design systems since 2018 I came to conclusion there can be two type of design systems on a live service: traditional and headless.

****Using LEGO as an analogy makes this much easier to understand. This is how I explain the difference between a headless design system and a traditional design system using LEGO pieces and sets:

A traditional design system is like buying a specific LEGO set.

• Pre-Built Purpose: The set comes with pre-defined pieces and instructions to build something specific—like a LEGO car, castle, or spaceship.
• Limited Flexibility: You can build exactly what the box shows (like a castle), but if you try to build something else, you’re constrained by the specific pieces in the set.

A headless design system is like getting a big box of loose LEGO bricks.

• Flexibility: You get the building blocks (design tokens like colors, spacing, typography), but no instructions or pre-set idea of what to build.
• Endless Possibilities: You can use the same pieces to build anything—cars, houses, spaceships—on any "platform" you want (React, Vue, mobile apps, etc.).