Appendix
Further reading
The essays, tools, sites, and hubs worth your time
The primary sources. Anything worth understanding properly is better read there than summarized here, and most of these are readable in an evening.
Essays and talks
The writing and talks the chapters draw on.
- 7 Practical Animation TipsEmil Kowalski's seven tricks: button scale, no scale(0), instant subsequent tooltips, easing, transform-origin, speed, and blur.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital GardenMaggie Appleton, 2020: the history of digital gardens and the six patterns of gardening.
- A Sloppy Interface Is a Security LiabilityJim Nielsen, 2026; interface quality as a security control against impersonation.
- A Subtle Nicety of Fault Tolerance in HTML & CSSJim Nielsen, 2024; prefixing a CSS rule with a character to toggle it while prototyping.
- A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the EnlightenmentMaggie Appleton, 2025: on chatbot sycophancy and the case for more critical interfaces.
- Agents with TasteEmil Kowalski on packaging animation judgement into skill files, with his easing flowchart and duration tables.
- AirfoilBartosz Ciechanowski, 2024: the physics of flight, with flow fields you can drop markers into.
- Ambient Co-presenceMaggie Appleton, 2023: a pattern for a subtle, peripheral sense of shared space on the web.
- An exhaustive review of design tool hover areasSteve Ruiz, 2026: a scripted survey of selection hit areas across tldraw, Figma, Excalidraw, Miro, Spline, and Rive.
- “Apple Human Interface Guidelines (1987)”Apple, 1987; the original HIG, listed in Rauno's resources.
- As Good as HTMLJim Nielsen, 2023; HTML's composability as a quality bar for components.
- Aspect Ratio Changes With CSS View TransitionsJim Nielsen, 2025; a subtle outline bug and the one-line fix from Jake Archibald.
- Back to ContentSteve Ruiz and Ani Krishnan, 2026: a 20-month bug from confusing not-visible shapes with culled shapes.
- BicycleBartosz Ciechanowski, 2023: the invisible forces that make a bicycle ride, built up from a wooden box and a slider.
- Bridging the hard and the softAmelia Wattenberger: rigid and flexible interface parts, with strategies borrowed from nature.
- Building a drawer componentEmil Kowalski on Vaul: the iOS sheet curve and 500 ms duration, drag performance, scroll guards, snap points, and the theme-color bar experiment.
- Building a Toast ComponentEmil Kowalski's account of building Sonner: naming, the stacking animation, transitions over keyframes, momentum swipe, and the Observer pattern.
- Building an animation courseEmil Kowalski's behind-the-scenes of animations.dev, including the easing flowchart and his 18 custom easings.
- Building Websites With LLMSJim Nielsen, 2025; lots of little HTML pages linked and enhanced with cross-document view transitions.
- Cameras and LensesBartosz Ciechanowski, 2020: a camera built from first principles, sensor first.
- cmdk ARCHITECTURE.mdPaco Coursey's notes on the compound-component constraint behind cmdk and the alternatives he rejected.
- Code was our medium for thoughtAmelia Wattenberger: what agentic coding loses when code stops being where thinking happens.
- Coding Is DesigningJim Nielsen, 2026; a short post arguing code is a way to find a design, not just implement one.
- Color SpacesBartosz Ciechanowski, 2019: RGB color spaces explained by playing with two color pickers that disagree.
- Command K BarsMaggie Appleton's 2022 pattern write-up: what command bars are, why they scale where GUIs do not, and the apps that use them.
- Computational NotebooksMaggie Appleton, 2023: a pattern for shareable, browser-based documents that run code.
- Contrasting AestheticsRauno Freiberg, January 2024, on aesthetic intersections and how the right amount of contrast invites curiosity.
- Craft and beauty: The business value of form in functionStripe Sessions 2024 talk cited by Emil Kowalski for the commoditisation argument.
- Craft and SatisfactionJim Nielsen, 2025, asking whether AI help changes how much you care about what you made.
- Crafting the Next.js WebsiteRauno Freiberg, 2023; grid lines, switchboard, focus rings, serif quotes, clamp, and gradient tracing from the Next.js site.
- Creating a Zoom UISteve Ruiz, 2021: the canvas, camera, screen, and viewport model and the math for pan and zoom.
- Creative OutputPaco Coursey, 2019, on being unhappy with his own work, remixing, and the inspiration phase.
- Curves and SurfacesBartosz Ciechanowski, 2021: Bezier curves, splines, and subdivision surfaces through draggable control points.
- Custom text underlinesPaco Coursey, 2020; linear-gradient underlines with position, weight, dashes, and descender skipping.
- Daily Notes PagesMaggie Appleton, 2022: a pattern for frictionless daily capture in knowledge tools.
- Dead Zone DraggingSteve Ruiz, 2021: a minimum distance before a drag begins, built as a three-state machine.
- Debugging a physical race condition with modifier keysSteve Ruiz and Ani Krishnan, 2026: a 150ms release delay for modifier keys.
- Design engineerJeremy Keith, 2021; embracing the title despite misgivings about the word engineer.
- Design Engineering at VercelGlenn Hitchcock, Henry Heffernan, John Pham, Rauno Freiberg, and Yasmin Pessoa, 2024; what Vercel's design engineers care about and how the work is organised.
- “Design Engineering Handbook”Natalya Shelburne, Adekunle Oduye, Kim Williams, and Eddie Lou, 2020; the InVision PDF that Voisen calls the most thorough resource on the role.
- Design engineering, a working definitionSean Voisen; the three activities of design engineering, from running the practice inside Adobe Design.
- Design EngineersChris Coyier, Frontend Masters blog, 2024; the engineer half and the design half, and a vote for Web Design Engineer.
- Design Leadership Interview at DoorDashKathryn Gonzalez, 2020; how the Design Infrastructure team came about and what she looked for when hiring.
- Design Systems and InfrastructureKathryn Gonzalez, 2018; what Design Infrastructure at DoorDash does and why it is a home for people who love both sides.
- Design Systems in Transition: Anxiety, AI, and Where We GoKathryn Gonzalez, Config 2023 talk; busywork, the extra ten percent, and design systems as the language AI tools consume.
- Designing Between the LinesJim Nielsen, 2021; design the relationships between things, not just the things.
- Designing DepthRauno Freiberg's 2024 essay on dirtying the frame, blurred backdrops, choreography, staggering, and affordance through motion.
- Designing Fluid InterfacesC. Karunamuni, N. Vries, M. Alonso, WWDC 2018; Apple's session listed in Rauno's resources.
- Designing Search for DoorDashKathryn Gonzalez, 2015; the article she says got her the most important job of her life.
- Developing TasteEmil Kowalski on why taste matters and how to train it: exposure, analysis, practice.
- Disable transitions on theme togglePaco Coursey, 2020, on temporarily removing all CSS transitions while switching themes and forcing a repaint with getComputedStyle.
- Engineering imperfection with draw shapesSteve Ruiz, 2026: seeded randomness, multi-pass strokes, and corner rounding for hand-drawn shapes.
- Erasing shapesSteve Ruiz, 2026: treating eraser input as line segments to avoid tunneling.
- Evolving the infinite canvasAmelia Wattenberger: proposals for hardcoding spatial behaviours and Gestalt rules into canvases.
- Exposing Floating PointBartosz Ciechanowski, 2019: IEEE 754 floating point, a companion to his tool float.exposed.
- Figma's Interactive Components Were Not Designed For ThisSteve Ruiz, 2021: what Figma prototypes could not model and why the constraints are useful.
- Fish eye for textAmelia Wattenberger: focus and context at once, from maps to Wikipedia to the code editor.
- Fixing the Drift in Shape RotationsSteve Ruiz, 2021: why rotating a selection back leaves it elsewhere, and the held-pivot fix.
- Folk InterfacesMaggie Appleton, 2022: a pattern for people reappropriating software to solve their own problems.
- Friction as a FeatureEmil Kowalski's short essay arguing that friction forces judgement and filters ideas that do not deserve to be built.
- Gas Town's Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at ScaleMaggie Appleton, January 2026, on Steve Yegge's vibecoded system as design fiction and why design becomes the bottleneck.
- Gathering StructuresMaggie Appleton, 2024: structures for running meetups and communities, from the London Future of Coding meetup.
- GearsBartosz Ciechanowski, 2020: an interactive article on rotational motion, torque, and tooth shape.
- Get the browser default font sizePaco Coursey, 2023; read the browser default with font-size: medium.
- Getting creative with embeddingsAmelia Wattenberger, 2023: using embeddings to place sentences on interpretable scales in a writing app.
- Good DesignJim Nielsen, 2022; good design for who, and a priority of constituencies.
- Good vs Great AnimationsEmil Kowalski's practical tips for going from good to great: origin, easing, custom curves, springs, knowing your tools.
- Good WritersPaco Coursey, 2019, learning to recognise good writing by pulling apart a first sentence.
- Goodbye, DoorDashKathryn Gonzalez, 2023; leaving after almost eight years, from an old animal hospital to a post-IPO product.
- Gotchas in Naming CSS View TransitionsJim Nielsen, 2025; what a view-transition-name custom-ident can and cannot contain.
- GPSBartosz Ciechanowski, 2022: builds a positioning system from a draggable figurine up to trilateration and satellite signals.
- Great AnimationsEmil Kowalski's principles for animations that feel natural, fast, purposeful, performant, interruptible, and accessible.
- Historical TrailsMaggie Appleton, 2023: a pattern for showing people where they have been on a branching journey.
- How Do You Want to Live?Kathryn Gonzalez, 2023; a travel essay on what comes after the role.
- How to Build a ModalKathryn Gonzalez, 2017, on what a design-system modal really takes: stacking contexts, focus management, scroll locking, and real-device testing.
- Interdisciplinary Website MakerJim Nielsen, 2024; how interviewers react to a designer who codes, and why Design Engineer almost fits.
- Invisible Details of Interaction DesignRauno Freiberg's 2023 essay; its Frequency and Novelty section argues that command menus used hundreds of times a day should not animate.
- Job Screening Blog PostJim Nielsen, 2024; two GIFs, a heading that shifts by one pixel, and one question: do you care?
- Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate ChatbotsMaggie Appleton, 2023: sketches of non-chat interfaces to language models.
- Lights and ShadowsBartosz Ciechanowski, 2020: light, power, angles, and shadows in a scene you can drag around.
- LLMs as a tool for thoughtAmelia Wattenberger: language models as a brainstorming partner rather than a way to steer somewhere.
- make real, the story so farSteve Ruiz, 2023: how Make Real came about and what putting generated websites back on the canvas showed.
- Making Films and Making WebsitesJim Nielsen, 2024; the only source of truth is the website people use; everything else is a tool in service of it.
- Mechanical WatchBartosz Ciechanowski, 2022: a watch movement you can rotate and slice open, explained part by part.
- MoonBartosz Ciechanowski, 2024: the Moon, orbits, tides, and eclipses, starting from a draggable sky.
- NoveltyRauno Freiberg's 2026 essay on how much novelty an interface can carry, including first-load-only staggers.
- On Design Engineering: I think I might be a design engineerTrys Mudford, 2021; finding the name in the Design Engineering Handbook, the design to engineering gulf, and CSS as the primary language.
- On taste, part 3Julie Zhuo's essay, cited by Emil Kowalski for building a curated list of tastemakers.
- Our interfaces have lost their sensesAmelia Wattenberger: a case for multimodal interfaces and tangible artifacts over chat logs.
- Out With the JS, In With the HTMLJim Nielsen, 2026; replacing a JS resize widget with four pre-rendered pages and view transitions.
- Perfect DraggingSteve Ruiz, 2021: why a drag should use the delta from its origin, not the last pointer event.
- Personal Website, Personal ShrineKathryn Gonzalez, 2023; why she rebuilt her site, the three principles behind it, and the sites that inspired it.
- Programmable NotesMaggie Appleton, 2022: a pattern for note systems that run user-written rules and prompts.
- Programming PortalsMaggie Appleton, 2022: a pattern for small, scoped programming areas inside graphical interfaces.
- Putting knowledge in its placeAmelia Wattenberger: on giving the human user context around an answer, not just the model.
- px vs rem in font-sizePaco Coursey, 2022; rem only matters if you respect browser font scaling.
- Quality Means The Flexibility to ChangeJim Nielsen, 2024; quality as ease of change, via Dave Farley and Ben Nadel.
- Redesign 2021Paco Coursey, 2021; stripping a personal site down to documents and links in the name of performance, simplicity, and craft.
- Redesigning the laser tool for better annotationsSteve Ruiz, 2026: from a self-consuming polyline to grouped fading scribbles.
- Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For InteractionsJim Nielsen, 2026; post-mortem on the multi-page approach, including the history.back() menu close.
- Reordering Part 1: ArraysSteve Ruiz, 2022: Send to Back, Bring Forward and friends as array operations.
- Reordering Part 2: Tables and Fractional IndexingSteve Ruiz, 2022: fractional indices for ordering items in tables and multiplayer documents.
- Safari favicon showing white background on dark modePaco Coursey, 2023, on Safari's favicon contrast behaviour and the colour change that fixed Linear's icon.
- Sanding UIJim Nielsen, 2024; build, click around a ton, tweak, repeat, and the dead click zone a flexbox gap left behind.
- Sanding UI, pt. IIJim Nielsen, 2025; an SVG selected as text, fixed with user-select: none.
- Should you pursue a career in design engineering?Sean Voisen on the Adobe Design blog; the role at Adobe, T-shaped people, and three ways to get started.
- Some Miscellaneous Thoughts on Visual Design Prodded By The Sameness of AI Company LogosJim Nielsen, 2025, on homogeneity at scale and why the work of individuals and small teams keeps its soul.
- SoundBartosz Ciechanowski, 2022: air, pressure waves, and tones you play on little keyboards.
- Stay away from my trash!Steve Ruiz, 2026: why tldraw began closing external pull requests after an influx of AI-generated ones.
- SVG Caching with <use>Paco Coursey, 2020; reuse rendered icon DOM with SVG use and hashed ids.
- Taste is Eating Silicon ValleyAnu Atluru's essay, quoted by Emil Kowalski: in a world of abundance, we treasure taste.
- Text is not enoughSteve Ruiz, 2026: tldraw's MCP App puts a canvas inside a conversation with an agent.
- The AI AestheticJim Nielsen, 2026, cataloguing the design idioms of the AI moment: sparkles, streaming and shimmering text, tiny icons, cream and orange and serif.
- The Attributes of a Design EngineerKathryn Gonzalez, 2024; her definition of the role after building the practice at DoorDash: autonomy, craft, and fidelity.
- The Browser Company on the novelty taxVideo cited by Rauno Freiberg in Novelty; Arc as a saxophone that was hard to turn into a piano.
- The Case for Design EngineersJim Nielsen, 2022; why the artifact explosion of responsive design makes design engineers worth their weight in gold.
- The Case for Design Engineers, Pt. IIJim Nielsen, 2024; a draggable divider shows why look and feel cannot be specced in a design tool.
- The Case for Design Engineers, Pt. IIIJim Nielsen, 2024; Christopher Nolan's Writer/Director credit and why the creative process is not an assembly line.
- The curious case of user interfacesRasmus Andersson, Figma, 2023; a talk listed in Rauno's resources.
- The Dark Forest and Generative AIMaggie Appleton, 2022: proving you are human on a web flooded with generated content.
- The Figma to Browser ChasmJim Nielsen, 2023; a Figma file is only as good as its implementation.
- The Gulf Between Design and EngineeringRune Madsen, Design Systems International; the design handover as the root cause, and code as the real design product.
- “The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement”Paul Morris Fitts, 1954; the paper behind Fitts's law.
- The Magic of Clip PathEmil Kowalski's guide to animating with clip-path: comparison sliders, image reveals, scroll progress, and tabs.
- The origins of design engineeringDavid Luhr, 2024; a timeline of the term from Coyier's Great Divide and Shelburne's 2019 talk to the 2024 job listings.
- The Taste Gap (Ira Glass)Clip of Ira Glass on the gap between taste and ability, posted by Emil Kowalski and cited in Developing Taste.
- The Tension Between Logical Reasoning & Illogical CreativityJim Nielsen, 2023; design engineers hold the logic of code and the illogic of ideation in balance.
- The Tumultuous Evolution of the Design ProfessionJim Nielsen, 2025; on Elizabeth Goodspeed's essay, profit margins, and the optics of building.
- The Unseen Work of DesignJim Nielsen, 2021; the final product is discovered through unseen refinement.
- Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational ObjectsMaggie Appleton, 2021: a historical and anthropological reading of the tools for thought field.
- Train Your JudgementEmil Kowalski's side-by-side exercises on duration, easing, scale, stagger, popLayout, interruptions, and layered motion.
- “Understanding Interaction Design Practices”E. Goodman, E. Stolterman, R. Wakkary, CHI 2011; the paper Rauno cites on treating practice as a black box.
- Vibe Code is Legacy CodeMaggie Appleton, August 2025, agreeing with Steve Krouse that vibe code is code nobody understands.
- View transitions: Handling aspect ratio changesJake Archibald, 2024; explains and fixes aspect ratio changes in view transitions.
- Visualizing Fitts's LawKevin Hale, 2010; an illustrated article on the law, listed in Rauno's resources.
- What will you ship?Rauno Freiberg with Glenn, Henry, and Alasdair, 2023; shipping the Vercel homepage with performance and constraint as north stars.
- Why Chatbots Are Not the FutureAmelia Wattenberger, 2023: the case for tools with affordances and controls instead of a bare text box.
- Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?Radek Sienkiewicz's piece on logo sameness that prompted Jim Nielsen's post on homogeneity.
- Write it downPaco Coursey, 2019; the policy of writing every idea down, every time.
- You Don't Need AnimationsEmil Kowalski's essay on why you are animating more often than you should: purpose, frequency of use, and perceived speed.
Tools and libraries
The things you will actually install.
- AI Skills for Design EngineersEmil Kowalski's free skill files for coding agents: design engineering, animate, review-animations, and more.
- cmdkPaco Coursey's composable command menu React component; the README doubles as the documentation site.
- cmdkRauno Freiberg, 2022; the command menu component behind many Command K bars, downloaded millions of times per week.
- Code AtlasGitHub Next exploration by Amelia Wattenberger: a model's answer as an editable workflow of code blocks.
- Code BrushesGitHub Next exploration in Copilot Labs (preview ended December 2023): select lines, pick a brush, see the code change.
- Collaborative coding workspacesGitHub Next exploration: remote collaboration as sharing context, not just cursors.
- Copilot for DocsGitHub Next exploration (preview ended December 2023): documentation answers with citations.
- Easing GraphsAlex Vanderzon and Lochie Axon; 28 named easing curves with their cubic-bezier values and CSS snippets.
- Emil Kowalski's design engineering skillsSkill files encoding Emil Kowalski's animation and component rules, including the duration table and the modal transform-origin exception.
- emilkowalski/skillThe repository behind Emil Kowalski's skills; the README explains why agents do not have great taste.
- GitHub BlocksGitHub Next exploration (preview ended December 2023): custom, interactive blocks for files, folders, and repositories.
- Make Realtldraw: sketch an interface on the canvas and get a working website back.
- MinimapRauno Freiberg, 2024; the minimap scroll prototype inspired by games.
- next-themesPaco Coursey's theme abstraction for React apps: no flash on load, system preference, and a documented set of defaults.
- perfect-arrowsSteve Ruiz: functions for drawing arrows between points and shapes.
- perfect-freehandSteve Ruiz: a library that draws perfect pressure-sensitive freehand lines from input points.
- Radial MenuRauno Freiberg, 2023; the prototype embedded in the Fitts's law section, hold and rotate from anywhere.
- repo-visualizerAmelia Wattenberger's GitHub Action that draws a codebase as nested circles and redraws on every change.
- skill-creatorAnthropic's skill for writing skills, which Emil Kowalski uses to package taste decisions.
- SonnerEmil Kowalski's opinionated toast component for React, with documented defaults for gap, visible toasts, and duration.
- tldraw SDKtldraw: an infinite canvas SDK for React, with the tldraw.dev blog.
- VaulEmil Kowalski's drawer component for React, built on Radix Dialog and modelled on the iOS sheet.
- Web Interface GuidelinesRauno Freiberg; a non-exhaustive list of details that make a good web interface.
People and sites
Personal sites that are portfolios in themselves.
- (Basic) BookmarksRauno Freiberg, 2023; the bookmarking tool where he removed motion from core interactions.
- Amelia WattenbergerEssays on novel interfaces, data visualization, and AI tools, plus her GitHub Next work.
- amoThe social app whose wordmark animates through contrasting typefaces, cited in Contrasting Aesthetics.
- Andrew SwankDesigner and engineer by design; a site built from scratch as a demo, with project pages for Google Assistant and Google Flights.
- App DissectionBrian Lovin's close studies of apps, cited by Emil Kowalski as a model of studying rather than using.
- Bartosz CiechanowskiInteractive articles on machines, physics, and graphics, each opening with a model you can drag.
- Emil KowalskiDesign engineer at Linear, formerly Vercel; creator of Sonner, Vaul, and animations.dev.
- Jim NielsenFifteen years of blogging, 805 posts, and icon galleries; his home page and blog.
- Kathryn GonzalezIndependent design and engineering director, formerly Head of Design Infrastructure at DoorDash; her site and writing.
- Linear careersLinear's careers page and its statement on the lost art of building software.
- Maggie AppletonA digital garden of notes, essays, and patterns, designed and built by her and published as open source.
- MercuryOSJason Yuan, 2019; the concept OS Rauno recreated in SwiftUI for the swipe-trigger example.
- Not BoringApps for everyday functions that are novel for people who value beauty and game-feel; cited in Novelty.
- Paco CourseyWebmaster at Linear, formerly Vercel; a site of documents and links, plus a craft page of interaction experiments.
- Paco Coursey's craft page: Command MenuThe 2021 playground that became cmdk, with a 249-item test set and a 2,000-item performance goal.
- PP Foundry bitmap fontsThe NeueBit and Mondwest page that pairs a bitmap typeface with Leonardo's Annunciation.
- Radix UIWhere Rauno Freiberg first saw serif quote marks paired with Inter.
- Rauno FreibergRauno Freiberg's site: essays, the craft log, projects, and a running diary; the site itself is an argument for its subject.
- Rauno Freiberg's craft indexRauno Freiberg's index of prototypes and essays, including Command Menu (2021) and ⌘K Breadcrumbs (2022).
- Raw MaterialsThe studio whose logo has four animations, one per visit; cited in Contrasting Aesthetics.
- Steve RuizSteve Ruiz's site and blog, with the design tool micro-UX posts.
- Stripe PressStripe; an intentionally experimental site cited in Novelty as novelty working through contrast.
- Vercel homepageThe October 2023 Vercel homepage documented in What will you ship?
Hubs and resources
Collections that map the field and keep it current.
- A Collection of Design EngineersMaggie Appleton, 2024; a short definition and a roster of ten people who do design engineering work in public.
- Animations on the WebEmil Kowalski; a course on easing, timing, springs, and taste, with four walkthroughs and more than 35 lessons.
- Bartosz Ciechanowski on PatreonWhere every ciechanow.ski article asks readers to support the work.
- desengs.comCurated by Maze Heart; a tagged feed of tools, articles, people, communities, and jobs for design engineers.
- Design Engineer JobsMoe Amaya; a job board dedicated to design engineering.
- Design Engineering ClubA design engineering community, listed on desengs.com.
- Design Engineering ResourcesArun Venkatesan; a curated list of posts, conversations, courses, tools, and a job board, contributable on GitHub.
- Design engineering resourcesSean Voisen, updated 2025; an annotated list of articles, the Handbook, podcasts, and communities.
- Devouring DetailsRauno Freiberg; an interactive reference manual for interaction-curious designers, 23 chapters with 23 React components.
- Fullstack D3 and Data VisualizationAmelia Wattenberger's book and course on building charts with D3, design principles included.
- Maggie Appleton's patterns catalogueDesign patterns gathered from observation and research, each with context, pattern, and examples.
197 sources
Links go to the primary sources; anything worth understanding properly is better read there than summarized here.