People
The designers and engineers this book reads
The chapters read these people closely: their essays, their components, their sites. This page says who they are in their own words and points at the work, so you can go to the source instead of taking this book’s word for it.
Rauno Freiberg
rauno.meStaff Design Engineer at Vercel; previously The Browser Company (Arc). Estonian interaction designer; maker of Devouring Details.
Describes himself as an Estonian interaction designer working with Vercel and Devouring Details. At Vercel he works on the platform, design system, marketing pages, and Next.js Dev Tools; before that he designed and built the Arc browser at The Browser Company. His craft page is a dated log of prototypes and production work going back to 2021, and his essays (Invisible Details of Interaction Design, Designing Depth, Novelty, Contrasting Aesthetics, Crafting the Next.js Website, What will you ship?) are the spine of Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5. He also shipped cmdk with Paco Coursey, the Web Interface Guidelines, and Devouring Details, an interactive reference manual with 23 chapters and 23 downloadable React components.
Emil Kowalski
emilkowal.skiDesign engineer on the Web team at Linear; previously the design team at Vercel. Author of Sonner, Vaul, and animations.dev.
Says he likes to build things for designers and developers and to think deeply about how an interface looks, feels, and behaves. At Vercel he developed the design system and dashboard; at Linear he works on the web team. He created Sonner, an opinionated toast component for React, and Vaul, a drawer component, which together are downloaded over ninety million times a week from npm. His course animations.dev opened for presale in January 2024 with a goal of a thousand students and has enrolled more than ten thousand. His essays on when not to animate, practical animation tips, clip-path, taste, and judgement anchor Chapters 2, 3, and 5.
Maggie Appleton
maggieappleton.comStaff Research Engineer at GitHub Next; previously Lead Design Engineer at Normally, founding product designer at Elicit, Head of Design at HASH, illustrator and UX designer at Egghead.
Introduces herself as a designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer, sitting at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development. Her work fits under design engineering, product design, and visual interface design, with cultural analysis, writing, and illustration on top. Her site is a digital garden of essays, notes, patterns, smidgeons, talks, and a library, designed and built by her in Astro and MDX, with growth stages from seedling to evergreen. Her note A Collection of Design Engineers is this book's starting definition of the role; her patterns catalogue and her essays on tools for thought and generative AI carry Chapters 6 and 7.
Bartosz Ciechanowski
ciechanow.skiAuthor of interactive explanations at ciechanow.ski; supported on Patreon.
Publishes long interactive articles that explain how things work by letting you drag them: Gears, Lights and Shadows, Cameras and Lenses, Internal Combustion Engine, Naval Architecture, Curves and Surfaces, GPS, Mechanical Watch, Sound, Bicycle, Airfoil, Moon, among others, plus earlier graphics programming posts from 2014. Each opens with a demo you can manipulate, switches between metric and imperial units, and ends with further reading and an invitation to support the next article on Patreon. Maggie Appleton lists him as not a design engineer by profession but a good example of blending design and engineering for educational content. Chapter 6 reads his method.
Kathryn Gonzalez
www.ryngonzalez.comIndependent Design and Engineering Director; formerly DoorDash's first designer and frontend engineer, then Head of Design Infrastructure.
Joined DoorDash in 2015 as its first designer and frontend engineer, led product design across Consumer and Merchant products, started DoorDash Drive, led frontend engineering, and then spent six years building and leading the Design Infrastructure organisation (design systems, design engineering, prototyping, accessibility), ending as a manager of managers over twenty-five people. Now works independently, offering fractional design and engineering leadership and hands-on execution to early-stage companies. Her essay The Attributes of a Design Engineer, her design systems writing, and her How to Build a Modal guide anchor Chapters 3 and 8.
Jim Nielsen
blog.jim-nielsen.comWeb designer and developer who identifies closest to "design engineer"; blogging for fifteen years, more than eight hundred posts.
Has blogged for fifteen years and more than eight hundred posts about HTML, CSS, the web as a medium, design process, and the design engineer role. Holds an interdisciplinary degree that was more graphic design than programming, and writes that Design Engineer has come to feel like the right fit because it is deliberately cross-discipline. Collects iOS and macOS app icons and helped turn the collection into a book. His three-part The Case for Design Engineers, Coding Is Designing, Out With the JS In With the HTML, Sanding UI, and The AI Aesthetic run through Chapters 4, 5, and 8.
Paco Coursey
paco.meWebmaster at Linear; previously developed the Vercel design system, website, and dashboard. Author of cmdk and next-themes.
Describes his work as crafting interfaces, building polished software and web experiences, and experimenting with magical details in user interfaces. His site is set in Inter, Söhne, and Newsreader and built with Next.js with JavaScript disabled because you do not need it to read documents. He wrote cmdk, the composable command menu component, and next-themes for dark mode without a flash, and keeps a craft page of implemented interactions. His posts on the 2021 redesign, disabling transitions on theme toggle, and rem versus px feed Chapters 3 and 4.
Steve Ruiz
steveruiz.meFounder of tldraw (infinite canvas SDK for React, Series A, London); previously Play and Framer. Author of perfect-freehand and perfect-arrows.
A developer, designer, and startup founder in London with a background in visual art who works primarily in creative tools for the web, builds lots of prototypes, and notes that some of those prototypes turn into products. Formed tldraw in 2022 around his infinite canvas SDK; its demo at tldraw.com became an end-user application with close to half a million monthly active users. Earlier he helped design a mobile-first design app at Play and made educational content for Framer. His open source includes perfect-freehand, perfect-arrows, globs, and state-designer. Chapter 7 reads his engineering posts and the stroke algorithm.
Amelia Wattenberger
wattenberger.comPrincipal Research Engineer exploring novel UIs and ML on the R&D team at GitHub (GitHub Next); author of Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization.
Says she creates things on the web, explores novel interfaces, turns data into meaning, and empowers developers with AI. At GitHub Next she has built Code Atlas, Copilot for Docs, Brushes in Copilot Labs, GitHub Blocks, collaborative coding workspaces, and codebase visualisations. Her book and course Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization distil ten years of visualising data. Her essays (Why Chatbots Are Not the Future, Our interfaces have lost their senses, Fish eye for text, LLMs as a tool for thought, Evolving the infinite canvas) are read in Chapters 6 and 7.
Andrew Swank
andrewswank.comDesigner and engineer at the intersection of business outcomes, design, and product engineering; formerly UX Engineer at Google.
Describes himself as a designer and engineer by design who guides cross-functional teams to build products with impact for users and organisations. At Google, as a UX Engineer, he built the voice prototyping toolkit that let Assistant designers prototype without code and was used for more than eight thousand voice prototypes, and the Google Flights mobile datepicker that became the Material Design standard. His own site is built from scratch as a demonstration: viewport-based sizing with vmin and rem, max() and round() to snap to a four pixel grid, HSL variables for colour animation, and a variable font animated with font-variation-settings. Chapters 4 and 8 read it.
Roles and descriptions are taken from each person’s own site at the time of writing. Their sites are the primary sources; this page is a map, not a substitute.