Issue No. 2—

Recap

• We've added an Updates page to host our newsletters.

• We've created a placeholder for our Stories page, in anticipation of our upcoming interviews.

  • Our first interview in the "Stories" series featuring Design Engineers has been conducted. We'll notify you when it goes live.

• We've started publishing our d×e first-party articles. While these are currently reposts of some of Karl’s original articles, we plan to introduce new content soon. We would appreciate your contributions to help us amplify our content.

• We've initiated the development of smart features by utilising Liveblocks and Clerk to increase the engagement of both Stories and Posts.

• We're progressing towards the launch of a new feature aimed at managers seeking to hire their first (or next) Design Engineer, Creative Technologist, UI Engineer, etc.

  • Although it's not ready to go live yet, we expect it to be available in the coming month.

Articles & Videos

In a nice little Essay, Dylan Smith breaks down his approach around how Designers should code: Learn enough HTML, CSS, & JavaScript to communicate with devs, create interactive prototypes & boost career ops. Start with online resources, practice & collab with devs. 

How should designers code?

Andy Bell teaches us how to recreate a complex hero grid layout from Dribbble using CSS Grid, absolute positioning, z-index, and pseudo-elements! Break down the design, leverage Grid for structure, and get creative with layering effects.

Reality Check #3: Building out a layered hero grid layout from Dribbble - Piccalilli

Social post of the Week

We. Couldn't. Agree. More...

https://x.com/ilikescience/status/1781314452383481877

Job Postings

We’ve added a series of recent job posting, most notably for Zed, Restream, TAILWIND (not the CSS framework…) and Character.ai. We’re not going to continue to heavily update third-party posts on the site given the lack of API support and fluctuation of roles. Instead, we’re focusing on making it easier to understand how to hire Design Engineers into your team. We’ll be sunsetting these third-party job posts in the near future.

If you’re thinking of applying to one of these jobs but you’re still a little wary or unsure about Design Engineering as a role, reply to this email with your worries and we can have a chat! In the meantime, Sean Voisen shared some great resources here.

See you next time!
Karl & Hugo

Issue No. 1—

Recap

The first edition. Probably shouldn’t put too much emphasis on this, but it’s important for setting the tone.

Probably helps if we introduce ourselves, and videos tend to do this better than the written word. Well, in most instances. Check it out on Twitter X below.

So now you know how the project came about, we’re keen to hear from this early audience; what do you wanna see? How do you wanna get involved?

Get at us in the tweets, the emails or even the DM’s (@_hraymond or @_kejk — honestly the underscores were completely accidental).

The format of these things is probably going to change a lot in the next few, but we’re gonna try and be good, and try and get this into your inbox once a fortnight.

Should be easy, right?

Articles & Videos

We rediscovered an older video about Design Technologists from Clarity Conf in 2021. Great content that really hits to the challenge of the perceived ‘Design → Engineering gap’.

Here’s Chat GPT’s summary of it:

"The concept of a 'design and engineering gap' is common in the design systems world, but this could be solved with the introduction of Design Technologists. These individuals are skilled in both design and research best practices and also have the ability to create accessible, scalable components with APIs that engineering teams can utilize. The key is that they already understand the 'language' of both design and engineering. This summary suggests that Design Technologists can strengthen and unify teams across an organization. It encourages everyone to adopt a Design Technologist's mindset regardless of their job title."

Social post of the Week

We saw a pretty awesome post from Parker Gibbons this week showing how he used Perplexity AI to handle some clever Mock → Build flows, including the new Dev Mode annotations from Figma.

Site Update

Added Job Postings

This is the newest edition to the site, recognising that the more people are talking about some remix of the words Design, Engineers, Technologist, UI/UX or “Creative” (just please don’t fucking call us Unicorns, because we actually exist) the more we’re seeing jobs (yay! paid work!)

Bare with us though, in spite of us being mystical creatures, we set this up manually not magically (for now). If you’ve seen a listing and thought, “This is cool, and I don’t mind some healthy competition” or “I’m not actually looking right now.” then submit it over ‘ere.

Added Resources

In prep for our own hosted content (coming soon!), we’ve relocated the external posts to a new Resources section along with a couple of other helpful platforms we’ve found.

For now, the original Posts are still in the same Posts section of the site, but once we’re ready this’ll be a space for brand new content. If you’d like to contribute to that content, send us an email.

Add Stories placeholder

We’ve got some exciting content coming in the form of “Stories”. We’ll have more to share on this soon too, but for now, you’ll just have to be patient...

If you want to get involved, you can both submit an article you’ve written or found, or a job posting via the relevant page sections for Posts and Jobs. Fire ‘em over!

Until next time!

Karl & Hugo