Jakub KrehelA look at the invisible side of design engineering.
Summary
Judged by social media, design engineering looks like animated eye candy, which Jakub says is well wide of the mark. Ten people will give you ten definitions of the role, so he wrote down what the job actually involves day to day. Most of it is accessibility, responsiveness, performance and the edge cases that only surface once people use the thing. None of that is interesting enough to post, and all of it decides whether the product feels good. The piece makes the case with live demos of hit areas, reduced motion, locale formatting and a 500ms action next to a five second one.
View full writingGoes well with
emil-design-eng
The design-engineering house style behind Sonner and Vaul.
Emil's main skill. Mostly animation, with the UI-polish and component judgement that surrounds it: what to build, how far to push it, and when to stop.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills
prototype
Builds several genuinely different UI variants behind a live picker.
Flip through real implementations instead of arguing about descriptions, then promote the one that wins.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill prototype
apple-design
Apple's interface and motion principles, translated for the web.
Distilled from the WWDC design talks. Gesture-driven UI, spring physics, interruptible transitions, translucent materials, optical sizing and the restraint underneath all of it.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill apple-design
Emil Kowalski