A living doc: notes and resources

README.md

Hi, I'm Flo. I'm a designer turned design engineer. I didn't code much at all until November of 2024. v0 introduced me into vibe-coding, which got me building personal projects, which lead me to joining Vercel. At Vercel, I worked on back-of-frontend and interactions for v0. Now, I work on agentic interfaces & workflows as the first founding design engineer at Paradigm.

Defining the role

• Design Engineering - The discipline bridging design and dev & why it matters
• The Attributes of a Design Engineer - Kathryn Gonzalez
• Design Engineers - Maggie Appleton
• The Rosetta Stone of Design Engineering - Yann-Edern Gillet
• Design Engineering - David Hoang, Proof of Concept
• Design Engineering at Vercel - Vercel

Guidelines & agent skills

• Web Interface Guidelines, Vercel
• /rams - CLI Design engineer reviews for coding agents
• UI Skills - Opinionated constraints for agents
• skills.sh - Open agent skills ecosystem by Vercel

Interesting tools

• Locale - Preview local fonts, by Josh Puckett
• Before and After - Add before & after screenshots to your PR, by James Clements
• remotion.dev - Make videos programmatically
• agentation - Annotate web elements for coding agents, by Benji Taylor
• Shadow - Open-source background coding agent, by Ishaan, Rajan, and Elijah
• CMYK Emulator - By Daniel Petho

Resources

• ui.land - Curated by Emil Kowlalski
• Ahmad Shadeed - In-depth articles on CSS
• Fancy Components - Library of eye-catching open source components

Courses I've purchased

• UI Engineering 101 for Designers - by Mariana Castilho and Derek Briggs, I took this in November of 2024
• animations.dev - by Emil Kowlalski
• Devouring Details - by Rauno Freiburg
• Interactive SVG Animations - by Nanda Syahrasyad
• Interface Craft - by Josh Puckett
• Design Engineering - Engineering Track, Web - by Karl Koch

Design pattern libraries

• mobbin.com - Design & animation library for iOS & Web
• aiverse.com - AI UX interactions library
• shapeof.ai - Exploring how UX evolves with AI

Communities

• Design Engineer IO - Resources & job postings
• Design Engineer Club - Community of like-minded DENG's

Personal perspectives

• I Think I'm a Design Engineer - Trys Mudford
• Becoming a Design Engineer - Marcel Wichmann
• Design Engineering - a State of Mind - Andy Zhang

People I admire

Designers, engineers, and design engineers

• Jakub Krehel
• Daniel Petho
• Rachel Chen
• Josh Puckett
• Thariq Shihipar
• Robert Pavlinić
• Dan Hollick
• Zenith
• Liam Matteson
• Mitul Shah
• Smintfy
• Rauno Freiberg
• Arsen Kolyba
• Soren
• Paco Coursey
• SJ Zhang
• Maxime Heckel
• Bradley Ziffer
• Szymon Kaliski
• Amelia Wattenberger
• Mery Kaftar
• Joe Bell
• Benji Taylor
• Jordan Singer
• Ishaan Dey
• Tikhon Belousko
• Josephine Onggowarsito
• Michelle Liu
• Elissa Martial
• Wilson Hou
• Chloe Yan
• Josh Wolk
• Emmi Wu

Notes

Material understanding beats tool proficiency. Only mastering Figma and React misses the point. Design engineers think in terms of the final medium: what users actually interact with. Code and pixels become one malleable material.

Design engineering streamlines the creation process, minimizing back-and-forth. Marrying design and implementation internalizes the translation layer, rather than externalizing it into handoffs. Time collapses between idea and validation.

Prototyping is central but not the whole story. While rapid prototyping and UI implementation are visible outputs, the deeper value is in establishing strong foundations—design systems, component libraries, and patterns that elevate entire teams.