Where to go next

The most compact hub is Design Engineering Resources at designengineering.arun.is, maintained by Arun Venkatesan, with a contribute link on GitHub. It hosts nothing of its own; every item links out, in six sections. Blog posts: Benji Taylor’s Family Values, Kathryn’s Attributes post, Vercel’s post, David Hoang’s Proof of Concept issue, David Luhr’s origins, and Rauno’s Invisible Details. Conversations: a Dive Club deep dive with Glenn Hitchcock and John Pham on design engineering at Vercel, and an 8VC fireside chat with Ramp and Vercel on the future of frontend engineering. Courses, with prices: Nanda Syahrasyad’s SVG Animations ($119), Emil’s Animations on the web ($119), Josh W Comeau’s The Joy of React ($249), Bruno Simon’s three.js journey ($95), and the W3C’s Introduction to Web Accessibility (free). One example (Basement Studio’s lab), two guides, and one job board, designengineer.io by Moe Amaya. The guides are worth a stop. Easing Graphs (easing.dev, by Alex Vanderzon and Lochie Axon) is 28 named curves, each with its cubic-bezier, a duration control, and a CSS snippet; five are custom, credited to Lochie Axon, including Anticipate, cubic-bezier(1, -0.4, 0.35, 0.95), and Snappy Out, cubic-bezier(0.19, 1, 0.22, 1). Web Interface Guidelines is Rauno’s “non-exhaustive list of details that make a good (web) interface.”

desengs.com calls itself “The Ultimate Resource for Design Engineers,” curated by design engineers for design engineers, and is a single flat feed of items with a title, a one-liner, a date, and a link, filtered by tags: Read, Watch, Listen, Browse, Use, Build, Learn, Join, Follow, Apply, plus a random button. Its Use entries are a working toolbox: NumberFlow for animating numbers, Sonner, cmdk, Transitions.dev’s copy-and-paste transitions, OKLCH.fyi, The Component Gallery, Laws of UX, Devouring Details, Web Interface Guidelines, Easing Graphs again. Its Read entries overlap with this book: Emil’s Developing Taste and You Don’t Need Animations, Kathryn’s Attributes, Maggie’s collection, Vercel’s post, Rauno’s Invisible Details, Family Values. Follow lists Jakub Krehel (founding design engineer at Interfere), floguo (founding design engineer at Paradigm), Rauno, and Emil; Join has the Design Engineering Club and the designengineer.io board; Apply is live listings (a Founding Design Engineer at Autumn, a Product Design Engineer at Zed, a Design Engineer at Rockstar New York, at the time of reading). The site’s talent network says plainly who it is for: people who “care deeply about craft,” “move comfortably between design and code,” and “have a portfolio showcasing their work,” and not for people “primarily focused on design or engineering alone” or “still building your first projects.”

Sean Voisen keeps an annotated list of design engineering resources (last updated January 2025). Its articles include the ones this chapter reads (Kathryn, his own working definition and Adobe piece, Madsen, Hoang, Maggie, Jim’s three parts, Mudford) plus Karl Emil James Koch’s Become a Design Engineer, practical advice for newcomers through a kind of intrapreneurship; Emil Widlund on why the career is an investment; and David Darnes asking whether 2025 is the year of the title. Its one book is the Design Engineering Handbook, the 2020 InVision PDF by Shelburne, Oduye, Williams, and Lou, which Voisen calls “perhaps the most thorough, in-depth resource on design engineering in existence,” covering the role, processes, collaboration with engineering, career growth, leadership, and organisational design. He lists the Dive Club episode, the d x e platform at designengineer.xyz for its growing job board, and the Design Technologist Club, whose Slack is “relatively quiet.” Maggie’s collection, read in 8.2, is the people list: ten names, each with a website and two examples of work.

Three courses by people in this book go deeper on what the chapters only sketch. Emil Kowalski’s animations.dev (“How do you craft animations that feel right?”) has four base modules (animation theory in eight lessons, CSS animations, Motion, good versus great animations) and four walkthroughs (the Family drawer, the Dynamic Island, a navigation menu, SVG animations) over fifteen lessons, more than 35 lessons and 40 exercises in total, with new content each enrollment; it began as a presale in January 2024 with a goal of a thousand students, and 11,632 designers and engineers 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, split into three units: Principles, Prototypes, and Resources. Amelia Wattenberger’s Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization is a book ($129, with all code projects) and a masterclass of 52+ lessons and more than five hours of video; “Charts are like an x-ray for your data,” and the promise is custom D3 charts within the first ten minutes. The arun.is list adds the SVG, React, three.js, and accessibility courses above.

The rest of this book’s apparatus is built for the same purpose. The People appendix collects everyone the chapters draw on: who they are, what they made, and where to find them. Further reading lists every primary source by kind, essays and talks, tools and libraries, people and sites, hubs and resources, so you can go from a claim in a chapter to the page it came from. The glossary quotes each term in its author’s words.

What to do tomorrow is written down by the people in this chapter. Sean Voisen’s Adobe piece gives three starting points that do not require a new job: jump into the prototyping process, contribute to your company’s design system, and work on small UI-focused engineering projects. “Often, the first step toward more autonomy is simply being proactive. Act with more autonomy and more opportunities will naturally come your way.” Jim says build it, click around a ton, and sand until you cannot give yourself another splinter. Kathryn says share what you learn and bring people along, and on her own site, share openly and consistently. Maggie says follow the people who work in public and pay attention to their outputs. Emil, in the README for his skills, calls them “a side-effect of domain-expertise” and adds: “So learn to code, design, or develop expertise in any other field. It’s extremely valuable.” Vercel says apply even if you have never had the title. And Rauno’s footer, once more, 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.