Design Engineering 101
Practical guide to the jobs and skills of the design engineer in tech
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Color AI: generate meaningful color palettes with cultural references
Design Discipline Bookstore: designer books and accoutrements
designengineer.ing: lifestyle brand for design engineers
For decades, design engineering referred to the intersection of industrial product design and mechanical engineering.
Now, in tech, design engineering refers to the union of visual design and software development, and it’s one of the current things — In 2024, more than 10 thought leaders in the industry created discourse on design engineering with essays and educational material. (Links at the end.)
This popularity of design engineering in tech is a result of macro developments in the last 5–10 years, like the following:
Hardware — It’s now feasible to run impressive visuals and motion on the average computer.
Developer tools — With new web standards and the likes of Figma, React, Tailwind CSS, Vercel, and Framer Motion, design-focused developers achieve much more than before.
Economics — Software is now a commodity, where design is a competitive differentiator.
As a result, my inbox is full of young people asking how to learn design engineering and get jobs. To set you up for success, I’ll throw light on 2 questions:
What are actually the jobs that design engineers do in tech, day-to-day?
How can you learn to do these jobs?
What Even Is a Design Engineer?
A design engineer is an engineer with design skills, so that:
They don’t need designers designing what to build — they can take inputs that designers take and deliver the outputs that engineers deliver.
When working with designers, they communicate very efficiently and make contributions to design work.
They build with production-grade materials (e.g. code) for design decisions that can’t be experienced on any other material (e.g. interactions).
They build tools to make designing easier, better, faster, and to design things that could not be designed before.
Doing these things today requires extensive skills in both design and engineering. There are very few educational programs and resources that specifically teach software design engineering. Most software design engineers learn by dual-classing: separately learning design and software engineering.
In the future, I expect books, courses, and other resources will emerge to specifically and efficiently teach this discipline — just like we have for industrial design engineering. Right now, software design engineering is a unique opportunity for creative self-learners.
What Do Design Engineers Do?
Despite the new technological capabilities that resulted in its popularity, design engineering in tech is not a new job — it’s simply a re-configuration of the jobs that designers and engineers have been doing for years.
Here are 4 kinds of things that design engineers work on in tech:
Marketing
Design engineers on marketing teams build impressive websites and make their company look attractive on the internet.
One reason why marketing hires design engineers is when the website is large and feature-rich — beyond what makes sense to do with website builders like Framer or Webflow. Large companies like Stripe have this need. This work requires strength in traditional front-end and full-stack development skills. With higher budgets, these projects also call for impressive animations and creative graphics while retaining accessibility.
Marketing websites might also involve rich animations, 3D, and game-like experiences. Also known as “creative development”, Unseen Studio’s work is a great example in this category. This kind of work requires advanced skills around HTML/CSS, 3D graphics, motion design, typography… These devs often push innovation on immersive design and interactivity, at the expense of conventional accessibility.
Product
There are two focus areas for product design engineering:
“Polish” of the user interface – motion and interactivity – which is challenging to hand off from design to engineering.
Design systems, which accelerate design, and facilitate the design to engineering handoff.
The scope of shipping a product involves user research, backend engineering, test-driven frontend development… So, this role is highly collaborative — this job posting from GitHub lists “product design, design systems, design ops, front-end development, and illustration” as the talents that span the team. The design engineer speaks all of those languages.
Product design engineers do whatever it takes to steward product quality — a mix of front-end development, graphics, UX, UI, and motion design skills, in a way that plays with others on the team.
R&D
R&D design engineers build prototypes of new things, to visualize and test new products in the real world.
This kind of design engineering has been around for much longer than roles focused on websites and product interfaces. However, these jobs are rare, found at larger and economically stable companies — see Ivan Poupyrev’s work at Google, and Jordan Singer’s Figma-funded innovations.
Worth knowing, from a job market perspective: At the first signs of distress, R&D is the first to get canceled at even the most stable companies — see Ikea’s innovative Space10 lab, which closed doors last year.
In R&D, you constantly learn new skill trees. I’ve done 10 years of R&D and learned the Python, Lua, C#, MATLAB, Unity, JavaScript, Arduino, and Processing platforms, as well as electronics, robotics, physical fabrication, and photography. It’s the Wild West — you have to draw quickly.
Founding
The founding design engineer can execute UX, growth, and brand identity design as well as product-building — life-altering combination for solopreneurs and small early-stage teams.
Arguably, all of the internet-famous software solopreneurs like Pieter Levels, Danny Postma, and Marc Louvion are design engineers: They not only build but also publish themselves, taking care of UX design and marketing as well as their core engineering work.
I have been selling this skillset as a service to early-stage founders since early 2023, and done some of the most valuable work in my life. Of course, there are downsides: early-stage ventures have massive economic uncertainty, and demand extreme breadth of skills across business, design, marketing and engineering.
How to Learn Design Engineering
As said above, we don’t have many resources today that specifically teach software design engineering. However, if you have an existing foundation in design or engineering, there are resources tailored to help you dual-class.
For designers, here are my favorites:
Harvard’s CS50 – one of the top online courses in the world – teaches computer science and programming from the ground up
The Odin Project and freeCodeCamp are free resources that teach web development, highly acclaimed by professionals
The UI Engineering 101 for Designers course by veterans Mariana Castilho and Derek Briggs. goes for “polish” in frontend
Scrimba is the most innovative online coding school, for all levels
For developers:
Refactoring UI is one of the most efficient textbooks on interface design
Ellen Lupton’s Thinking with Type demystifies typography and layout theory
Awwwards Academy offers courses on visual design and creative skills taught by seasoned professionals
Animations on the Web is a cutting-edge course by Emil Kowalski
And once you feel ready for the challenge, the job board at designengineer.io is an excellent place to start looking.
Tech moves very fast. Some of you might be already working on textbooks, courses, and other resources that specifically and efficiently teach interface design engineering. If that’s you, please reach out and say hi.
Thanks to Dmytro Kondakov, Mert Düzgün, Emil Kowalski, and Mariana Castilho for improving this article with their comments.
Others on design engineering:
The Case for Design Engineers by @jimniels (2022)
The Case For Design Engineers, Pt. II by @jimniels (Feb 2024)
Comprehensive analysis of Design Engineer as a term by @david_luhr (Feb 2024)
Why a Design Engineer career is an investment for your future by @emilwidlund (Feb 2024)
Design Engineering at Vercel (Mar 2024)
A Collection of Design Engineers by Maggie Appleton (Mar 2024)
Design Engineering: An emerging role in software by David Hoang (Mar 2024)
The Attributes of a Design Engineer by @ryngonzalez (Apr 2024)
UI Engineering 101 for Designers course by Mariana Castilho and Derek Briggs
Animations on the Web course by Emil Kowalski