Collection
Design engineers worth knowing
The people who live in the gap between design and code, and refuse to pick a side.
Every company says it wants one and almost none of them know how to hire one. A design engineer designs the thing and then builds it, which sounds like two jobs and is really one job done without a handoff in the middle.
The tell is always in the details: the animation that knows when to stop, the chart that explains itself, the interface that feels obvious in a way that took somebody weeks.
The design engineers
7 profiled so far, newest first.
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Ahmad Shadeed
Writes from Tulkarm, read by the whole industry
Ahmad Shadeed explains CSS more clearly than almost anyone alive, from a town in the West Bank, for the half of the web most developers forget exists
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Emil Kowalski
His code ships fifty million times a week, his name almost never does
Emil Kowalski wrote two components you have used today without knowing it, and built a career on knowing when not to animate
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Josh W Comeau
Teaches the most tactile thing on the web, once spent six months unable to touch a keyboard
Josh W Comeau built a career on interfaces you can grab and drag, and then had to teach himself to code without hands
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Aashish Kumar
Ten years designing for other people, now shipping his own
Aashish Kumar was founding designer on a protocol that moved five billion dollars, and the thing he built entirely by himself turns your photos into LEGO
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Shirley Wu
Independent data visualization engineer
Shirley Wu visualized every line of Hamilton and made the internet care about data art
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Susie Lu
Data visualization engineer, Netflix
Susie Lu is a painter who engineers charts so good you forget charts are usually bad
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Mackenzie Child
Design engineer who ships the pixels and the pull request
Mackenzie Child is the rare person who can sell you the vision on Monday and push the frontend on Tuesday
Common questions
- Which design engineers are profiled on Cool People Stories?
- Cool People Stories profiles 7 design engineers, including Ahmad Shadeed, Emil Kowalski, Josh W Comeau, Aashish Kumar, Shirley Wu, Susie Lu, Mackenzie Child. Each one has a full profile covering their story, what they have shipped, and links to their own sites.
- What counts as a design engineer on Cool People Stories?
- Someone who designs an interface and then builds it themselves, with no handoff between the two. In practice they tend to be the person on a team who cares most about how something feels to use.
- How are people chosen for Cool People Stories?
- There is no submission form and no sponsorship. Everyone is picked because they were interesting enough to write about, and the profiles are researched and verified before they go up.
Other collections
Indie hackers worth knowing · Builders worth knowing · Creators worth knowing · Designers and artists worth knowing · the whole directory