Where to go next
Three hubs#
Design Engineering Resources (designengineering.arun.is, Arun Venkatesan) hosts nothing; every item links out. Posts: Benji Taylor’s Family Values, Kathryn’s Attributes, Vercel’s post, David Hoang’s Proof of Concept, Luhr’s origins, Rauno’s Invisible Details. Conversations: a Dive Club deep dive with Glenn Hitchcock and John Pham, an 8VC chat with Ramp and Vercel.
Courses with prices: SVG Animations ($119), Emil’s Animations on the web ($119), The Joy of React ($249), three.js journey ($95), the W3C’s web accessibility intro (free). One example (Basement Studio’s lab), one job board (designengineer.io), and two guides: Easing Graphs, 28 named curves with their cubic-beziers, five custom by Lochie Axon including Anticipate, cubic-bezier(1, -0.4, 0.35, 0.95), and Snappy Out, cubic-bezier(0.19, 1, 0.22, 1); and Rauno’s Web Interface Guidelines, “a non-exhaustive list of details that make a good (web) interface.”
desengs.com is one flat feed tagged Read, Watch, Listen, Browse, Use, Build, Learn, Join, Follow, Apply. Use is a toolbox (NumberFlow, Sonner, cmdk, Transitions.dev, OKLCH.fyi, The Component Gallery, Laws of UX, Devouring Details); Read overlaps this book; Follow lists Jakub Krehel, floguo, Rauno, and Emil; Join has the Design Engineering Club; Apply is live listings (Autumn, Zed, Rockstar New York at the time of reading). Its talent network wants people who “care deeply about craft,” “move comfortably between design and code,” and “have a portfolio showcasing their work,” not those “still building your first projects.”
Sean Voisen’s annotated list (January 2025) adds Karl Emil James Koch’s Become a Design Engineer, Emil Widlund on the career as an investment, David Darnes on whether 2025 is the year of the title, and one book, the Design Engineering Handbook (2020), “perhaps the most thorough, in-depth resource on design engineering in existence.”
Three courses, and this book#
Emil Kowalski’s animations.dev has four base modules (animation theory in eight lessons, CSS, Motion, good versus great) and four walkthroughs (the Family drawer, the Dynamic Island, a navigation menu, SVG), more than 35 lessons and 40 exercises; it opened as a presale in January 2024 aiming for a thousand students, and 11,632 had taken it at the time of reading. Rauno Freiberg’s Devouring Details is “an interactive reference manual for interaction-curious designers,” 23 chapters with 23 downloadable React components. Amelia Wattenberger’s Fullstack D3 is a book ($129) and a masterclass of 52+ lessons; “Charts are like an x-ray for your data.”
In this book, the People appendix collects everyone the chapters draw on, Further reading lists every primary source by kind, and the glossary quotes each term in its author’s words.
What to do tomorrow#
Voisen’s Adobe piece gives three starts that need no new job: join the prototyping process, contribute to the design system, take small UI-focused engineering projects. “Act with more autonomy and more opportunities will naturally come your way.” Jim says build it, click around, and sand until you cannot give yourself another splinter. Kathryn says share openly and consistently. Maggie says follow the people who work in public. Emil, in the README for his skills, calls them “a side-effect of domain-expertise”: “So learn to code, design, or develop expertise in any other field.” Vercel says apply without the title. And Rauno’s footer, for the order of operations: make it fast, make it beautiful, make it consistent, make it carefully, make it timeless, make it soulful. Make it.