Design System Work for Sitecore Platforms
The system is not broken. Its vocabulary is.
The design system problem on an enterprise CMS is rarely that the system is bad. It is that its components answer a question the organization has stopped asking, so every new idea ends up as one of the layouts the kit already has.
We expanded Fidelity Investments’ design system — the editorial components, layout logic and specs their own team took into code and integrated into their Sitecore platform.
Sitecore is an enterprise CMS with a component model, editorial workflow and approval governance, personalization and multi-site delivery. A mature design system on a platform like it is doing real work — governance, accessibility, brand integrity, consistency across products — and the instinct when new editorial directions stop materializing is to blame it and price a replacement. That trade is almost always bad, because the parts under strain are the vocabulary and the parts working are everything else. The useful intervention is expansion from the inside. Widen what the kit can express, build the new pieces to the governance already in place, and hand them over so the platform team can maintain them without you. Done that way the system stops being the ceiling and none of what it was protecting gets traded away.
Our Work with Sitecore
How the Work Splits
An enterprise CMS with a component model, editorial workflow and approval governance, personalization and multi-site delivery, and the platform team and release cadence that usually sit around all of it.
The design side. Research into editorial patterns from outside the sector, prototypes built inside the client’s own design files, component and layout logic that flexes across content types without spawning a variant for every case, and annotated specs with flexibility and governance notes engineered so the platform’s own developers can take them into code.
A wider vocabulary inside the same governance. At Fidelity the expansion covered layouts that group content dynamically by topic, trend and investor interest, larger and more deliberate modules in place of fragmented small ones, and component logic flexible enough to adapt across content types — all built to the typography, spacing, color, accessibility and approval workflow already in place, and handed to Fidelity’s team, who took them into code and integrated them into the platform themselves.
The work in practice
The design system is usually the last thing anyone suspects. It is governed, documented, accessible and consistent across every product on the platform — and it can still be the reason no new editorial direction has shipped in a year.
The problem this is actually about
A system that is not broken, and is still the constraint. The components enforce consistency, scale across products, and hold the brand together. None of that is failing. What has happened is subtler — the kit was optimized for the editorial patterns the team needed when it was built, and the questions have moved on. Dynamic grouping by topic and audience interest, larger structured modules, layouts that compose into more than a list of components: none of it is in the kit.
So the work reshapes itself around what is available. Designers reach for what the system surfaces, because the familiar patterns are the ones it makes easy. Layouts repeat, storytelling flattens, and no one can point at a defect — which is exactly why it persists. There is no error state for a system that merely limits what gets imagined.
And replacing it would cost the parts that work. Governance, accessibility, brand integrity, scalability across products. Throwing the system out to fix a vocabulary problem trades all of that away for nothing.
How the expansion works
Look outside the sector for the patterns. Editorial design is a publishing problem, not a financial-services one. A cohort analysis of leading editorial experiences — how they group related content, structure topic clusters, sequence a narrative, guide a reader through dense material — comes back as structural patterns the existing brand standards can absorb rather than as a moodboard no one can act on.
Prototype inside the client’s own files. Not in a parallel universe of our own making. Work that lands in the team’s Figma, against their existing components, is work their platform developers can read.
Build to the governance already in place. Typography, spacing, color, accessibility and the approval workflow. Adoption should be an extension of the platform rather than a deviation from it, or the new components become the exception everyone has to remember.
Engineer the handoff, because someone else is building it. Annotated specs, flexibility logic for how a component flexes across use cases, governance notes, scalability expectations. On a platform with its own team and its own release cadence, the handoff is the deliverable — and a spec that assumes the designer will be in the room when it is implemented is a spec that will be implemented wrong.
Fidelity Investments
Fidelity runs one of the largest editorial operations in financial services. The design team arrived with a feeling rather than a diagnosis — something needed to change — and the finding was that the system’s vocabulary, not its quality, was the limit.
The expansion added layouts that group content dynamically by topic, trend and investor interest; larger, more deliberate modules in place of fragmented small ones; and component logic flexible enough to adapt across content types without spawning a new component for every variation. All of it was built to the governance already in place, documented in Storybook, and handed over. Fidelity’s team took it into code and integrated it into the platform.
What changed is that the kit stopped being the ceiling — new editorial directions can be designed and shipped inside the existing governance, on the existing development cadence, by the existing team, with no governance debt to clean up afterwards. The engagement is written up as Expanding a Design System From the Inside.
What this makes possible
Design system expansion, editorial pattern research, component and layout logic, and specs your platform team can implement without us in the room.
The kit stops being the ceiling, and everything it was protecting — governance, accessibility, brand integrity, consistency across products — stays exactly where you built it.
Practice leadership
Christopher Murray
Founder & CEOChris Murray has spent two decades on enterprise content platforms, where the expensive problem is rarely the software — it is a component kit that no longer matches what the organization needs to say.