Ep. 0: Design-dev Cast Introduction
Design-dev Cast, is a podcast about the intersection between design & development, for design engineers, hybrids or people who don't want to pick a side.
tl;dr
Hi, I’m Brett, a designer & developer in Tokyo. Thanks for taking the time to check this out. I appreciate it. I’ll get to it.
Design-dev Cast, is a podcast about the intersection between design & development, for design engineers, hybrids or people who don't want to pick a side.
In brief, I feel there’s a change in how people view the intersection of design & development, and for my own curiosity I wanted to make a podcast to…
learn & share information about the intersection of design & development, in all its forms
do interviews with builders talking about how they do their craft
discover insights & forms of the emerging Design Engineer role
and talk about design & development, without unnecessary boundaries, together or independently.
And, to do that I want to build a bit of a community around it, to hear about all the amazing things you’re doing, so please do…
subscribe to the podcast
(or the newsletter if you prefer)
join the chat on Substack
reach out to me though the socials
I’d love to hear who inspires you and who you want to hear from.
Well, that’s the pitch. I hope it piques your interest. If you’d like to learn more about why and what I want to do with the cast, as well as see a tiny collection of design-dev links I’ve collected recently, read on.
Intro, the extended remix
Spring has sprung and it’s time for new things, so I’ve decided to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while—start a podcast. Partially because lots of people tell me I should do it and partially because I want to talk to interesting people about how they make things. A couple years ago I listened to Song Exploder, the podcast where artist bring you through the process of how they made their iconic songs, for the first time. After that, I started watching a bunch of reality TV shows where people make things, like Next in Fashion or Masters of Interior Design, and realized I was excited by learning about how people approach their work. So, that was one part of the impetus.
The other part was that in my work as a freelance designer and developer I have struggled with what to call myself or how to pitch myself to others. Am I a design who codes or a hybrid product designer / developer? It’s all a bit of a mouthful. I started saying I do “design-dev.”
Over the past couple years I’ve followed and collected people who exist in both these worlds and I am continually excited by their work. And they have this same problem—a couple years back I found this tweet where many of them are asking what do we call ourselves. I learned that Github has this hybrid role, and that tweet helped me realize there were a lot of people feeling the same way, and doing similar things.
Since then things have changed a lot I feel and the term Design Engineer is being used much more. If you’ve read this far, you probably know of Vercel, the great things they make, and how they popularized the term. They are definitely a big part of it, but they are not all, not by a long shot.
Amongst all this there is definitely some trends or a certain vibe that some people who do design-dev work give off, but there are many more that break any mold and are their own unique butterflies. I’m excited to learn more about all different kinds of builders.
Another reason that I really want to do a podcast is that through podcasts, like syntax.fm and Design Details, I have learned so much, and part of that learning process is being exposed to things that you are not familiar with—you hear about something and you may not grasp it, you look it up and then you use it. Podcasts are a great way to do this because it takes little effort just to listen. What better way for designers who want to learn about coding or developers who want to learn about design to get exposed to things they have little experience with then a podcast that talks about the intersection of design and development.
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Recently, I feel like there is a big change happening—a recognition of the term & the amount of these kinds of roles growing, but more importantly, the tools we use are getting so good people can use a few design tools and a little code and cross the design and development gap much easier in years past. The libraries we use are getting better and better. CSS is getting crazy and allowing for so much possibility. Then there is React Native & Swift, oh my. Not only that, use of AI is making it easer for us all to answer questions and get elements we can mold into what we want to make. I feel like role will meld and we all be design-dev DJs of sorts, remixing designs and code to make beautiful and handy tools & products. There is a new era coming, and with it a lot of opportunity, exportation and fun.
So, excuse me while I feel these tingles of serendipity and join me on this journey of discovery. if you’re here, I’m sure you love this stuff as much as I do.
A few notes on structure
You might be wondering why I’m writing a blog post for a podcast. Well, I wanted a way for people to see what it’s all about without having to click play. It’s an easy way to way to share and writing helps me layout what I want to say. I chose Substack to host the podcast because it’s easy to have a podcast, newsletter & community.
As for the format of the podcast, I do want interviews to be the core of the cast, but I also want to have different segments or shows where we share or discuss new things we’ve found or new developments in the design-dev world. I’ll figure this out as we go along.
I want to be flexible so we can see how things grow. I might have a co-host. I might do some solo shows. It most definitely will revolve around web-dev, but I want to hear from people who use other technologies, like Swift, or people who do completely different things, like make music. And some days it might be all design, and others it might be all development. I want to break down the wall, but I also want to venture off into the horizon. You know what I mean?
More importantly, I want to know from you who you want to hear from, what projects, tools or techniques you want to learn more about, so please comment or reach out and let me know.
A tiny collection of design-dev links
I feel like there is so much great content being shared these days that I wanted to share some of what I’ve found. Also, I want to share some of the things that I’ve seen in the past that make me feel like this there is an emerging design-dev field, which is the reason I want to make this podcast.
This is a bit of a timeline of things I’ve found (some of it may be out of order).
Meng To, designcode.io. I’m not sure when I first discovered him, but I should say, Meng To has been making great content and courses that marry design and development in a beautiful way for a long time, a lot longer than I can remember other people doing it to a similar level. His course are amazing, and thy don’t just focus on one particular technology. He uses all kinds of tools.
This tweet really opened my eyes to the change happening inside companies. Darian Rosebrook asked “Do people still get hired as hybrid designer/developers? or do they usually just get bucketed to one or the other and not get to touch both again?” And a whole bunch of people replied, saying which companies had roles like that and what they were called. It’s very interesting.
More recently, Shop Talk Show had on Jim Nielsen and they talked about a few of his blog posts his series of blog posts called “The Case for Design Engineers” (Pt. II, Pt. III). All good reads.
This is an epic article by Maggie Appleton, targeted at “People trying to figure out what a Design Engineer is and want to see tangible examples of design engineering work.” She lists so many great design engineers and shows examples of their work. So many prolific builders. Definitely a must read.
There are many amazing people in that list, but one of them that I follow and makes many interesting things is Amelia Wattenberger. She wrote Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization and made these cool charts on the State of JS that show popularity over time.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin, the record producer, came out recently and is not specifically design & dev related, but it’s about the creative process and can act as a guide for anyone looking to create things. It’s part poetry, part essays, and reads like The Art of War. I found it very inspiring. The audio book is read by Rick Rubin making it all the more powerful.
It feels almost serendipitous that after I decided to do this podcast, this podcast episode was released: Design engineering deep dive with Vercel. It is an amazing look into what a design engineer is and how it works at a company like Vercel. Some interesting things from it…
They talk about what are the tools of design engineers are.
I learned that both Stripe and Linear have design engineers.
They kept using the terms builders and craft. I like these more general phrases.
ui.land, The Digital Library for Designers and Engineers, by Emil Kowalski, who is also doing this awesome course, animations.dev.
One of the things they talked about that was really interesting was that there are not specific requirements of things they look for in design engineers, that each of them have different skills & specialties and what is important is how they fit well with the teams needs.
I am sure many of you are familiar with IA Writer, the company of which happens to be in Tokyo also. Well, they have a new app called IA Presenter, which is a Markdown-based presentation app. It takes care of image layout and everything. I’d been wanting this workflow for so long. It is truly an amazing product, and it is one of the best examples I can think of of design & development done well together. I’d love to know how they work in more detail, because this recent podcast with the Founder of the company, Oliver Reichenstein, was really fascinating.
Adam Wathan shared an amazing job offer for a design engineer at Tailwind Labs.
Pedro Duarte, who co-created Radix and now works with Raycast (another amazing product), tweeted, “can we please not ruin the design engineer title now cheers”, which makes me think that with it getting more popular the meaning of it is perceived to be changing. I don’t know exactly how it would get ruined, but if people are keep building amazing crafted things, I’m all up for it.
The pitch, pt. II
So, this is where I bring it home. If you made it this far, I hope you’re in. You can…
subscribe to the podcast
(or the newsletter if you prefer)
join the chat on Substack
reach out to me though the socials
Ciao,
Brett
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