A "headless design system" is a term that's starting to gain traction, particularly in the context of web development and design. It refers to a design system that is completely separated from its front-end implementation. Essentially, it's a collection of design tokens and patterns that do not dictate a specific rendering layer or technology for the UI. Here's a breakdown of the concept: 1. **Design Tokens**: These are the smallest building blocks of a design system, like colors, typography, spacing, etc. In a headless design system, these tokens are defined in a way that they can be shared across different platforms and technologies without being tied to a specific framework. 2. **Patterns and Components**: Instead of providing components in a specific technology (like React components or Web Components), a headless design system might provide guidelines and specifications for these components, which can then be implemented in whatever technology is appropriate for the project. 3. **Content and Structure Over Presentation**: A headless design system focuses on the content structure, such as how data should be organized and accessed, rather than the specific presentation or how components should look on the front end. 4. **Technology Agnostic**: It doesn't assume a specific front-end technology stack. Whether the team is using React, Vue, Angular, or even a native mobile language, they can apply the design system's tokens and patterns. 5. **Front-End Flexibility**: By being headless, the design system allows front-end teams to make decisions that best suit their particular project's needs, rather than being forced to use a set of pre-built components that might not fit perfectly. 6. **API-Driven**: A headless design system may provide an API that allows developers to fetch design tokens and patterns in a format that can be easily integrated into their codebase, such as JSON, XML, or YAML. The advantages of a headless design system include greater flexibility, reusability, and the ability to integrate with modern development workflows that might involve headless CMSs, microservices architectures, and cross-platform development. It's a more abstracted approach that can help large organizations enforce consistency in design across a wide array of web properties and applications, each with their own unique technology stacks. #### Link [Creating a headless design system using Figma - LogRocket Blog](https://blog.logrocket.com/ux-design/creating-headless-design-system-figma) [Headless design systems in Figma. How to use Tokens Studio to create… | by Anna Rzepka | UX Collective](https://uxdesign.cc/headless-design-systems-in-figma-df141768929a)