Design engineering deep dive - Vercel’s Glenn Hitchcock & John Pham (Dive Club S5 | E8)

Over the last few months, design engineering has by far been the #1 most requested topic. So I wanted to get the inside scoop from the team at Vercel to learn more. In this episode we get to hear from:
1. Glenn Hitchcock - / glennui (Director of design engineering)
2. John Pham - / johnphamous (Lead design engineer)
The goal of this conversation is to help people understand the role that design engineers play and to outline a path you can take to develop some of these skills. We talk about:
- The strategy behind Vercel’s new website
- Why Vercel built a design engineering team
- How designers collaborate with design engineers
- What Vercel looks for when hiring design engineers
- How Vercel is always building with re-usability in mind
- + a lot more
- Maggie Appleton’s quote on software creation from our group interview - anthonyhobday.com/blog/202401...
- vercel.com/ship
- Framer components - drams.framer.website/ (inspired by Dieter Rams’ design principles)
- Screwball scramble - us.tomy.com/screwball-scramble/
- Dead Simple Sites - deadsimplesites.com/
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Chapters
0:00 Intro
2:20 Why Vercel prioritizes hiring design engineers
3:33 How design engineering sits in the org chart
7:52 How designers collaborate with design engineers
11:58 How Vercel approaches their design system
13:10 Difference between design and frontend engineers (and designers who can code)
21:11 Design engineering's role in creative direction
22:54 How design engineering collaborates with the rest of the team
26:09 Is "design engineer" a temporary role?
31:53 How Vercel spun up a new design org
33:36 How to know if design engineering makes sense at your company
34:56 The strategy behind Vercel's new website
37:47 What Vercel is looking for in design engineering candidates
39:48 The design execution gap
#productdesign #podcast #uiux #figma #design #ux

[@ericsonl_]

Thanks for this episode 🔥

[@eihab]

Great episode full of valuable insights 👏

[@jou-anchen7840]

is john on a treadmill?!

[@joindiveclub]

yes 😅

[@LaurensiusAdiKun]

I really love this episode, as an engineer who can design, I'm still looking for ways to grow, and this helps me figure out the trajectory.

[@joindiveclub]

think you're going to like tomorrow's episode then :)

[@lochieaxon]

Nice

[@srdjan.despic]

Hey Ridd, I remember your post from few year ago where you said that learning Webflow was more valuable then a 10k frontend bootcamp. Do you think the Framer offers the same value when it comes to learning about web dev concepts?

[@joindiveclub]

fantastic question. It's funny... because I think Framer is more intuitive which does mean you lose a bit of this lol.

[@srdjan.despic]

@@joindiveclub Hey, thanks for the quick answer, quick follow up question. If you were starting over and your goal was to learn more about frontend so your designs would become more feasible would you still choose Framer, or would you go with Webflow? 🙏

[@joindiveclub]

@@srdjan.despic I would still choose Framer :) There are other ways to learn Frontend principles.

[@realitydesigners]

Designers should learn code.

[@RazvanBadea]

or developers should learn how to design?