on design and what defines a great design engineer

A design engineer, to me, is someone who should be an artist at heart. Their role is to listen: to the world around them, to culture, to the arts, and to build a bridge that turns people's desires into something they can actually feel and live with. Design isn't a production line. Efficiency was never the point. The work is supposed to mean something, and a designer who treats it as mechanical output has already lost the plot.

They do, however, need a technical foundation. A design engineer should know the caveats of their medium. In the context of web products, that means understanding things like web performance, so that they can make something that doesn't just look right but truly performs and acts well. Great interactions cannot drop frames, a beautiful candle sconce should feel heavy and strong, a font on a poster should set a tone for the message. A great one is not someone who knows a few established design principles and can vibe-code them into life. A great one has real emotional investment in whatever they touch. I have yet to meet a great designer I look up to who doesn't call themselves an artist above all.

The mistake I see companies make constantly is over-indexing on how many projects someone has shipped, or how flashy they look. It's easy to fall for aesthetics going viral on Twitter and call it good design just because it works for a lot of people. Most companies do exactly this. A handful of people set some arbitrary rules, live by them, and preach them like scripture, and everyone else internalizes it as the only truth, with no room for objection. Congratulations you have fallen for groupthink propaganda.

Like I said, great designers are artists. And artists think in systems. How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What changes for the world, for my company, for its message, if I change one thing in this product? Thinking in systems means every pixel, every color, every corner radius has to pay rent. Every choice needs a reason behind it. Obviously when it comes to startups in particular, sometimes you may not have the time to really establish a completely branded design system as much as you wish for it. As long as you are slowly picking up the slack here and there whenever time allows, this is fine to me.

The last thing, and maybe the most important: artists are the most professional haters I've ever met. A great design engineer should be too. Hate other people's work (inside their head, or who knows you can always approach them with a nice conversation lol), interrogate why something is wrong, always reject mediocrity and repetition. The best ideas come from rejecting established patterns, out of pure play, when you force yourself to refrain from using them. If you think about it, this is what holding a great conversation is all about. Design is just a really good conversation.