Design Engineering at Vercel

An in-depth and interesting insight into the role of Design Engineer at Vercel.

The same job title can differ greatly between organisations and I want to share a few thoughts on my role in contrast to this. I’m part of a small team (of two for now), where I’m the only designer. I’m responsible for the whole product design process, our design system, UX, frontend development, and digital strategy & leadership within the business. It’s a big role, one that I enjoy a lot for its variety.

While the team dynamics and scale differ from my personal experience, the core of the role at Vercel and my own are the same.

Something I think Designers, Design Engineers and Frontend Developers alike have to put up with everywhere is the notion that we just make things look pretty. But as the Vercel team rightly state:

There is a lot of work behind the pretty pixels. Design Engineers must go beyond visual appeal and ensure the other pieces that make an exceptional user experience are taken care of.

In my approach to product and web design, I’ve never seen much value in creating every aspect of a design in software like Figma / XD / Sketch, to only have to recreate it in the final medium. It seems like an inefficient use of time and resources - something the folks at Vercel seem to agree with.

Prototyping design explorations that are easier to do outside of Figma—for example, animations, keyboard controls, and touch are better implemented in code to save the time and effort of reimplementing them from a different medium to the web.

(Emphasis mine). I tend to move from static mock-ups of interfaces to production code in the browser as quickly as possible - an approach that serves us well and enables us to deliver value faster.

The post on the Vercel blog is one of the most detailed and clear explanations of Design Engineering I’ve seen and well worth a read.