David Darnes, Dave, I think you'd like to go by Dave. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Thanks for, thanks for joining us. And you are in a different time zone. So
you're maybe starting to get a little bit sleepy. It's, it's probably dinner time
for you, right? It is dinner time for me. And I had a bit of a rough night with
two varying ill children. So yeah, I'll deal with it.
Yeah, yeah. All right, just pound some more coffee will be good Dave I noticed sack
Shared your your website with me and I love that little There's a little speaker
icon and you had your friends and colleagues Kind of call out your name,
which I thought was hilarious like David don't and So I'm hoping,
you know, if we would be so lucky to be able to kind of do our own version of
that, if you're willing, of course. Hit me with it. Yeah. And I know Zach,
Zach, like, let me tell you, he is quite, he's quite the karaoke king.
I mean, we, we did a team outing last last time we met up.
And he was rocking it. He did a rendition of,
I did it my way that was, I mean, he had everybody gone. It was, it was
fantastic. So, Zach, I kind of feel like you're going to have a good David Darnes
call out. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I Think I do have a David
Darnes call out on the website live. Oh, nice You do you do you have one and it's
it's fun It's I feel like it was deliberately phonetically like back to front like
to get the To compliment everyone else's like audio star most of them are my dad
Because that is the origin. It's his fault
He's the OG, and then everyone else is just trying to emulate that,
but Zach did it his way. I don't even, oh, wow, that was an incredible segue.
Yeah, that was fantastic. Wow, you have some clear podcast hosting experience under
your belt right now. I genuinely don't remember how it sounded. I haven't gone out
and listened to it lately. So I'll do a new one and it will maybe be the same or
maybe be different. I don't know. But we'll just do a round. Ready?
David Dorns.
Oh, man, you kind of, you stole my vibe, Zach. I was going to go.
Did I see it out? Yeah. Well, no, I was going to, I was going to kind of do
like a cheesy radio announcer one and you just stole my thunder, man. - I mean, you
have a very good radio voice. I will tell you that. - Thank you, thank you. - So
just one of me, it's fine, go ahead. - Yeah, yeah.
David Dodd! How's that? - Wow, the reverb there is incredible.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Great acoustics in
We're we're doing a we're doing a soccer slash football version, you know, it's a
it's a goal. It's a goal. We just made a goal. Yeah. Perfect. Well,
I don't, of course, Dave, I don't expect that you would put that on the site, but
I would be so honored if you did. Oh, it's going on the site. Okay. Okay.
Okay. No pressure. No pressure.
Also, you are the very first podcast awesome guest that is not a font awesomer,
so. - Oh, wow, I didn't realize. Oh, cool. Thank you very much. - Yeah, we're trying
to break into that and have folks from our industry and design and tech to come on
and, you know, there's a lot of folks out there that have interesting things to say
that are sort of In our space and Zach identified you as the very top person we
should talk to you. So Yeah, we're number one on it. Yeah. Yeah, and you wrote an
article that you passed on and I'm The title is escaping me right now,
but it's basically geared towards What is a design engineer in the industry,
in the biz, there's a lot of ridiculous job titles out there and maybe some
confusion or like is design engineer, does that even make sense for what it truly
is? What is it that sparked this article for you to write about this? Well yeah
you bring up some interesting points. points. The thing about it is like as with
many titles they kind of get born out of like people's desires to drill into a
certain space and get down to what they want to work on and what needs to be
worked on. And design engineer has kind of been a culmination of like two aspects
being a designer and being an engineer. Now those two words like separated cover
such a broad area. And when I asked the community about these things,
like that kind of came up as like a kind of, not necessarily like a contentious
point, but like a point of which like, are we starting to get too far into the
weeds of like, naming and titles and stuff like that. And it might well be true.
But I think What these this title does and what many others do is like assist
people into getting into the Areas of expertise that they want to be in and the
title is almost just a Vehicle to get there not necessarily a fixed label,
you know in an ideal world We would all be builders or creators and yeah because
of that ambiguity or people's desire to not be ambiguous, we end up with these
kinds of titles. And actually maybe to back up, but for someone who maybe doesn't
even know what we're talking about, even though, you know, these titles are somewhat
arbitrary, what is a design engineer? Like, how would you explain it to a non
-technical, non -design type person. Right. So in our context of web development and
application development, you have typically two sides of the coin.
It's like one side is the design part, creating the UI, the user experience, how it
looks, how it feels and all that kind of stuff. And then oddly, on the other side,
you have an engineer who is like, how it's made, how it's put together and that
and I'm trying quite hard not to like say the same things because there is tons of
overlap. And so this role is kind of right in the middle of that,
that person who has an eye and experience for design and how UI gets put together,
but also has the ability to then code that UI together and build that kind of
stuff. And they can be born from either side. They can come from any angle.
They don't have to be exclusively on either side, which kind of goes into this kind
of ambiguity kind of area. But that's the kind of thing. Someone who has the
ability to straddle both sides of that work. - Yeah, I'm curious, because I think
for me, it comes back to this, I think maybe the crux of the article in the
discussion is generalist versus specialist. And it's almost as though,
yeah, I wonder if you feel like a UX engineer or design engineer is a generalist,
or if they're just two very specific specialists that are mashed Hmm.
Well, those names did come up in like my research and like how people talked about
it and stuff. And like, in theory, that seems like it's the same kind of person.
Like, uh, it seems ironic to be to have written an article about this and gone
into depth on it when at the same time I don't really have like a hard opinion on
it. Like prior to writing it, I was like, I want to be a design engineer. I want
to be that person. And I've, and I've spoke to other people that want to be that
person. And then when I actually got into it, I'm like, well, the title kind of,
I'm not too bothered about the title. It's the, you know, what that entails is like
what I'm more like focused on. And like, you know, like, if I'm a front end
engineer, that gets to have a say and like a contribution in the design aspect,
and like, check, check, check boxes of ticks. And like, I'm quite content with that.
And like, I would like to think that other people would be in the same boat, you
know? Like,
maybe, you know, sometimes like seniority kind of comes into it, but that's a whole
other thing, you know, like, you know, level of experience and like having that
reflected in your title and like position and stuff. But yeah, that's a whole other
thing. Are there any noteworthy or really ridiculous job titles that you came across?
No, I don't think there wasn't any like ridiculous ones. There was interesting points
that like design engineer exists in other disciplines entirely like in like structural
engineering and like there's even at the university near where I live they have a
design a role, sorry, course, and that course is like structural engineering or like,
you know, like that kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, I can't really argue with
that point either. Like, that's not wrong. If anything, it might be more accurate,
like being like, more engineering, like engineering, as far as I can tell,
like, was it was almost adopted into like development and like Co, but like,
you know, then again, I didn't do a software engineering degree. I did a Interactive
design degree. So I can't really comment on that. Yeah Yeah, I was wondering if
there was some goofy stuff out there, and I'm sure there is, you know, there's
always like a I Don't know like where some of these ridiculous titles you come up
with and It's always like a such -and -such ninja or a unicorn or a rock star,
you know what? You've reminded me now a couple of people said rock star designer
and like Ninja and stuff like that. Yeah back in the time when we were using a
lot more textures and grunge
Yeah, we were we are against Those titles or I should say at least Dave Gandhi is
our founder. He says, you know, that that's basically just a way of saying a Young
person that doesn't have lots of experience that drinks lots of Red Bull and messes
up the code base late at night You know, they cut they come in late and the boss
says wow They're so dedicated because they're here day and night, but like they're
kind of blacking off and just hopped up on caffeine and sort of pretend that
they're rock stars, you know. - And then they test the website on the Tube TV and
then they throw it at the hotel window like when they're finished. - Yeah, pretty
much. - Like true rock star energy. - Yeah, that's right, yeah. - Yeah, they're never
getting their security deposit back. That's true. - Oh man, no, no they are not.
- I'm curious if you think that there is, just in your experience, your hunch on
the issue, I'm curious if you think more folks come to the design engineering role
from a design background or from an engineering background. Do you think that there
is a more clear path for one of the other?
I don't know. I really should have asked more people about what their like
educational background was in. Not that I'm like somebody who like like to gatekeep
from having education or not or anything, but like more to do is like that would
be a clear indication of their origin of like how they got to that point.
In addition, like it's, it's, it's probably hard for me to get it because that my
perception is, I mean like I'll admit I'm in like some of a bubble with like just
more designers than anything in my social space and stuff and that's through like me
coming from a design background of like like I said about my degree and my College
and experience and stuff and my career as well starting as a designer So I it felt
like more designers were like that Then again, I think it seemed quite balanced.
Like people have done lots of engineering, but like really wanted to get into the
involvement of like, the design part. So I didn't, I didn't really see like a clear
side. And I didn't even see like a clear position that would be most beneficial to
get you there. I don't think there's like a, if you come from this angle, you'll
definitely get to it. Like it's any any side or any angle Yeah,
I wonder if my perspective might be a little bit tainted by an overlap with maybe
the full stack Engineer so someone that calls themselves full stack might think of
Themselves as sort of a front -end and a back -end at the same time But it's
typically more back -end than front -end when people say full stack. I don't know
that I would see more folks calling themselves a front or a full stack engineer to
a design engineer. I don't know if I see a lot of that happening, but that's just
my hunch on the issue.
It sounds like some folks sort of push back on calling the role engineer.
Why would somebody have an issue with that? Well, engineers like kind of,
you like we talked about before with like a, you know, a structural engineer is
something that like requires like thorough experience and like certification because
these buildings tend to have people in them and those buildings need to stay up and
keep people safe and like do all sorts of other things as well. And that's very
like, officialized or like, you know, formal.
So I totally understand that pushback and there
was a Charlie who replied, she said about the, you know, in an ideal world,
we would we would change these roles so much. But like the way that we've kind of
come to this conclusion after like 20 odd years of like all the evolution of, of
like job titles and stuff, we've just ended up with these kinds of titles and
development has claimed engineer as well as all these other types of titles and
positions that it's just something we can't really undo now.
Maybe we can later on, but I I do understand, after like speaking to a few people,
I do understand that kind of worry that like it waters down the title and like the
position because we need to have clarity on that. But at the same time,
I don't want to pull the ladder up. I don't want to like, I don't want to gate
keep like from people being, you know, qualified to do the work that they have got
experience in. Do you get the sense that title helps to build credibility maybe with
the development teams? Yeah, I do. I think, you know,
and funnily enough, engineer, just the word engineer, that has a
engineering, and like I said before, structural engineering or engineering to do the
aerospace and stuff like that, that those have incredible credibility as well. And
not to say that web development and application development is less valuable or less
difficult or anything. It's been stretched into a thing.
If we had more naming conventions in that space, then maybe we wouldn't have
overlapped into it. It's just we've kind of incorporated those to like,
for lack of better terminology, you know.
But at least we don't have like titles like Webmaster and things like that. Like,
you know, some of those sounded a bit too like wizardry or like tainted,
shall we say. Very curious about the term engineer in terms of certification and how
it sort of overlaps between because I think a good argument could be made that
software can be just as dangerous as some of these other disciplines in terms of
writing bad software can be a dangerous thing for people in the real world.
And I'm wondering if you think that, I mean,
you sort of mentioned that there are certifications for these other disciplines.
Do you think that it would be better to have a formal like software certification
for some roles that exist like that? That's an interesting thought,
like,
I feel really bad because I'm like, I'm not being very decisive in my answers. Like
I'm not like playing a line in the sand, but like I'm very open to like stuff I'm
not going to like proclaim like what right is wrong is, but like,
you know, certifications and that people have the opportunity to have a card that
says, I did this and I earned this and I made this. That's great.
I'm very privileged to have a degree that I can like flash at people. Not that
I've really had to in my career, again, an adjacent privilege. But having that
degree is quite a powerful thing. It may be more powerful back in the day.
My dad used to say that if you have a degree, you could walk into anywhere and
get a job. And like, that was, that was, you know, well, that was the 90s.
Yeah, it used to be true. Like the 80s and 90s, like maybe, but like now it's a
different game. But it's like, it still holds weight and like, like, and,
and, and this actually relates to like a topic that I, that I am like personally
interested in, like kind of related to my, my wife's line of work is actually a
copywriter. She's She's like she does content writing and copywriting and stuff like
that and one of the things that really wants to be about that industry or an
adjacent industries to it is that it's undervalued. Like it's just I find it kind
of ridiculous that my wife will work just as hard as I will and write wonderful
content, interesting topics and really drill research and all that kind of stuff and
not make the same as what I do writing five lines of code and in like a god
awful bit of no JS of some kind. And like, I'm not devaluing it, but I'm just
saying that like content is not like valued enough. And like it is,
it should be more. And like, I guess that goes back to like the qualification thing
that like, if we're gonna have it, we should make sure it's valued. And we should
also make it as an inclusive opportunity as possible. Because when I went to
university, there wasn't like very much web development, like there wasn't a web
development course. But you know, I mean, you probably agree with me, Zach, there's
so much stuff in web development that, you know, you could train for three years on
it, you could do a masters in it. Easy. So had you had you done web development
before you entered or you made that sort of educational choice about what you wanted
to go into? Yeah, I guess I guess web kind of like turned up, popped its head up
in like my education like at college. I still have printouts of my websites that I
made at college. I don't have the files but I have the printouts. And then I did
it again at university like build your own website and a bit of flash and all that
kind of stuff and then like it just popped its head back up again when someone
said about WordPress and stuff in my career. Yeah I'm just curious if because there
was sort of a lack of formal web development education opportunity when you were in
school if you chose to go down the design path because that was the closest overlap
or? Yeah. Yeah. So it kind of came about because when I was at college,
I just really wanted to like get into games. Like I wanted to do like concept art
for games. And I used to do lots of illustration stuff and lots of like Photoshop
illustration stuff and things like that. And I tried to like emulate styles from
like really cool like illustrators and stuff. And I knew I wanted to again to that.
And then as time went on, like, I just kind of learned a bit of everything.
And like, eventually, like code kind of turned up as an opportunity to say,
right, well, if you can design it, you can actually build it, and then it will be
on a page. And then you've done it, you've finished it. That's yours now. And like,
it must have got me, like, consciously. And like,
and then the whole like WordPress thing and tumblr stuff and all those kinds of
things in my career, like another stepping stone into like, Oh, you can make
anything now, Dave, and you can, you know, make something and put it on the
internet. And that's that's it. It's done. The internet for worse. Yeah.
Yeah. Better for me, worse for viewers.
I don't know quite what the right way to put it would be, but maybe, I don't
know, the democratization, I don't know if that's the right word of things in
general. I actually, this is probably a bit of a side conversation, but I think it
relates, I was talking to my 16 year old daughter yesterday and she was saying,
oh, you know, there's these YouTubers that I like, they're going to go do like a
live show that I want to go see. And I was like, wow, it's so interesting, like
how entertainment has changed. And I guess the point is that in the good old days,
there used to be gatekeepers, right? In terms of like, and I was trying to explain
to her, and of course, I sound like an old guy. But the idea being that there
used to be all of these gatekeepers, say in entertainment or publishing or an
academia or whatever. Let's say you have like a, you know, publishing company.
It's not like anybody could write a book. You have to have credibility. You have to
say, okay, I went to university, I have a PhD and they say, okay, well you have
an interesting point of view on this and you're clearly educated. So therefore, yes,
you can write a book. Same thing goes with, you know, lots of different different
kinds of media. I love that we're living in an age where if someone has something
to say, they can publish something and get it out to the world, which is just
amazing. And yet, because that gatekeeping doesn't exist anymore, someone can kind of
show up and say, well, this is my title, you know, it's like, okay, well, where
are your credentials? So I love, I love the fact that like, A young person could
go online and they could hack their way through learning tech and design probably
and they could say, "I'm going to take three months to work really hard on
these tutorials and I'm going to have a basic understanding of say front -end
development or something like that." And I love that in the sense like that scrappy
kind of punk rock attitude of like, "Well, I and make my own path or whatever.
But again, that sort of gatekeeping doesn't exist in the same way. And therefore,
it might be like, well, we're gonna make sure that folks actually know what they're
doing. 'Cause Zach, I'm thinking about what you said earlier about,
you don't wanna create something that's gonna break or potentially You know, and if
somebody doesn't have actual actual credibility, you know, it could potentially cause
a problem I don't know. I don't know if that resonates at all. It's a little bit
of a side Conversation, but it just it came to mind.
I Yeah, I mean it somewhat reminds me of the way a lot of people perceive like
policing I I'm gonna try and link this back up, But like policing is all about
like telling people what like not to do, like almost in a gatekeepery kind of
fashion, like saying, you can't do this, you can't do that. And like, like policing,
it doesn't really like stop like the systemic like problems.
Like, how did people get to that point of which they, they had to do something
like that. That like that. There are services and routes that help people prevent
getting to that stage.
And in the same way for education and people's ability to get into the roles that
they get into the careers they want to get into, we have to catch them early and
give them the opportunities early and find those entry points for those interests.
And the web itself was like a rebellious bypass of those keeping kind of
perceptions. And it's broken down so many barriers, not only in terms of our
industry of building websites and creating them and all that kind of stuff, but even
like YouTubers and creating content online.
So many YouTube is like they make some great stuff. It's like watching a super
niche blog post like it right so good and As a as a as an aside my three -year
-old said today. She said she wanted a job Because she's seen me go to work every
day. Yeah What do you want to do as a job and she said I want to make a video
for my nanny like and That was it. - Oh, that's sweet. - That's sweet. But it's
like, okay, she'll probably be a YouTuber then. - Yeah, yeah. Oh, I love it
actually. After I gave that whole spiel, maybe the tie -in that I was trying to
get, like you kind of like hit on it is that, yeah, there used to be all these
things that were sort of gatekeeping. And my point to my daughter was like, you
know, back in the day, entertainment had its first two, you know, you had television
networks, you had movie studios and things like that. And now all those barriers
were gone. People can just create all this niche content and entertainment. That's
one thing. But in another sense, you have folks that are like total hacks saying
like, well, I'm a doctor. And because they have like a slick YouTube channel,
something interesting to say, it's like, well, no, you're not actually a doctor, you
know, you just have a YouTube channel. YouTube channel.
I don't know. It comes with good and bad. It's such an interesting time that we're
in. It does. These roles like design engineer and things like that are almost kind
of a callback to that gatekeeping space of like, "Well, the only way I'm going to
get into this space is by using design engineer or the word engineer to shield
myself from any, like, people that doubt you,
like doubt your ability and stuff like that, you know, it's a shame, but like, this
is the world we live in, like, it would be nice if interview processes weren't so
grueling, should we say. Right, yeah. Yeah,
I wonder if you think that there is value in sort of iterating on these job titles
every five or ten years to make them seem fresh and new, even though the role
might be very similar to maybe the past iteration. Yes,
I suppose it's a bit of a risk. I watched a really nerdy video about VHS tapes
and somebody was like, they were keeping hold of their VHS tapes to like convert
them to digital and every time they did that, because they would get better and
better technology each time, but every time they did that, that VHS tape would get
worse. So there was almost this weird like compromise between like, oh, but I
recorded it in 1080 now, but the picture quality was like deteriorating because of
the playback, the amount of playbacks. So like almost like the same with these
titles that like the, the, the regurgitation or the reformatting of them every time
is like it, they will lose like value anyway, just even if they get more and more
accurate, that like the weird way we, we iterate it, like it tends to end up like
watering down stuff. And then, you know, in 10 years time, we end up with the same
kind of ridiculous titles that we had for like all sorts of the, you know, I think
chief happiness officer comes to mind, but like, you know, at the same time, like,
you know, I would like to be happy. So sure. Yeah, I would like some happiness.
Yes. Yeah, it's not so bad. Yeah. So maybe just two job titles that we can just
alternate back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like fashion, like, you know,
like Bell bombs, like they come back around. - That's right. - Go out of style and
back in style. - Yeah.
- So Dave, you have been sort of, you're well known in the design system space.
I've been working on a lot of great design systems over the years. And we've been
getting a lot, lots of new web platform features to facilitate that work as well.
Web components, CSS variables, container queries.
How do you see sort of designers and developers bridging the gap in the middle And
how the web platform might play a role in that and smoothing that transition forward
Well first, thanks. I you know, I didn't realize I was in that space so much I
just like to share stuff but Yeah, I The more Yeah,
the more I think about and the more I see stuff in design systems, I've been
privileged not only to work on them, but to observe other ones in other companies
with my role.
Web components is becoming more and more like a kind of first choice or like a
logical choice in a design system.
If a company was to come to me and I didn't know any of their stack or anything,
I would probably would say web components. For some companies, it might not be
appropriate, depending on what their common stacks are, but that technology is getting
better and better each time, and not only that, it's built into the browser in many
ways. Yes, it has its caveats and it needs to grow more.
I think you would agree as well, Zach, from your talks and stuff that there needs
to be more ability to reuse web components and be more dry as I kind of perceive
it as.
But again, CSS variables and frameworks out there to help you get there,
like Lit, like I'm a big fan of Lit.
Those technologies are helping to polyfill for some of those areas. And even Eleventy
itself polyfills for some of those aspects of reusability and not having such a
dependence on JavaScript. I like web components, but I don't like using tons of
JavaScript and relying relying upon it.
I'm keen to see how it grows and like it's a slow one but it's going to get
there. I think it will become more of a thing and it is becoming more of a thing.
Like you know, even for just embeddable tools, like you know, it's pretty good
instead of an iframe, it's pretty powerful. So yeah, I'm keen to see what it would
do. I mean, I didn't really answer your question on how it would relate to design
and stuff like that. But I think it would help clear the path.
I think it would get rid of the weeds that are in the way for developers so they
can act more precisely in achieving their designs. And I've personally experienced
that. Yeah, I'm curious how much overlap you see between the title design engineer
and working in the design system space? Is it like a Venn diagram circle situation
or is there nuances in which you might have a little bit of design systems that
are outside of design engineer purview? Yeah, what's the what's the overlap there? I
think there's an incredible amount of overlap, like the concentric circle seems quite
kind of close, like there is a lot of like overlap there. But there is more
commonality with like designers spawning the design system as opposed to developers,
which it's great, it's great to have a design system get kind of built up,
especially out of a need, like especially in the space that like, or in a company
that needs that consistency or needs to help with efficiencies and stuff like that.
But I do think it's important for design systems to be born from like both a
design and development perspective and have those
voices in the decision -making process because everybody in that space,
everybody who would be in that meeting are all walking towards the same path.
Like, oh, walking towards the same result. Like, designers want to create consistency
and consolidate things and refactor design, basically. And developers are doing the
same thing. Like, if they wanna like, package stuff up and reuse things and factor
things, then, you know, a design system is going to do that for both design and
development. So I think it's important for, like, people who are looking to do it
now, like, to have both sayings in that matter. Yeah.
I mean, when it comes to working with designers and engineers simultaneously, I'm
curious if you see the role of your design system or how do you how do you
interpret people moving outside of the design system and how do you bring them back
into the fold of working with the design system? Are you more of a carrot person
where you sort of give them the incentive to to follow the rules that have been
laid out by the design system? Are you more of a stick person where you find the
folks that are misusing the design system or maybe using like one -off copies of
individual components slightly tweaked and then punishing those folks, which do you
see has more value?
- So as being an advocate in the past and as well as a developer in design
systems, is that advocating and finding advocates is super important and super
powerful.
Because it's in marketing, you find advocates, you find people that will promote the
product for you and share that knowledge with others, then you're going to find more
people and you're going to find more powerful people that can use that design system
as a force to be reckoned with. Whereas like kind of nudging people and being a
nagging person, you start to kind of end up with that perception that like it is
an enforced like oh you have to do it type thing. thing. If you can create a
level like FOMO, then it's going to kind of self -fulfill that destiny.
And I found that we would make tons of examples and share tons of demos and things
like that when we were working directly on design systems and creating like, "Oh,
you want to make this? Well, you could do it like this. Here you go, here's a
thing like this, and here's the thing like that. And we would incorporate them all
the time that, like, the opportunity to not only just use the design system to make
with the design system is, like, you're going to create fans,
like, within the company. Oh, you hope so. You hope to do. Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great perspective because I really do think that that that mindset
applies to everything. Like whether it is you're running a like an open source
community online or you're just trying to advocate for the web platform generally or
web components generally as part of the web platform. Yeah, it's I really like that
that perspective on how to how to build a good community around your around whatever
you're trying to advocate for? Do you sense that companies are getting better about
helping that relationship along between designers and developers,
are we still sort of in the throat over the wall once we get a project to a
certain place? Or do you sense companies are helping to foster better communication
and a better working relationship? I think it is getting better, but I still think
there's a waterfall process happening. Maybe for some companies,
that still works, and they're still quite happy to do that.
Even when you throw just responsive design into the mix, that waterfall just falls
apart. You can't swim upstream to that and say, "Oh,
hey, this is wrapping and not quite what you expect." Like, we need to kind of
find a middle ground. Or the developer ends up designing a bunch of resized views
that, like, this is all the, you know, I'm gonna have to pull out my design
expertise and say, right, this layout needs to change from like two columns to five
or, I don't know, down to two or down to three or something.
So I still think we need to get there, but I do think it's improving, and one of
the difficulties for design systems people is just making sure that they expose the
value. It's quite hard to be in that space and ensure the value is seen and
understood,
but I think it's getting better. I think we're getting towards where we need to be,
or where we would like to be. - Yeah, it makes me think, I'm thinking back to, it
goes back 10 years, I was working for an analytics consultancy, and we were doing
this big website refresh, and I was in charge of writing a good bit of the copy.
And I can't remember what came up, but I was working with the guy that was
building the site, and I don't think this was coming from him, but there was sort
of a sentiment at some point where it was like, okay, we've sort of framed out
what the site's going to look like. And you know, here's the lorem ipsum copy here.
And myself and another writer were like, uh,
no, no, no, no. We need to communicate like what this is about first.
And that's going to helped. And of course, you know, you need to have a little
back and forth on this. But as a writer, from my perspective,
it was like, we're communicating what this thing is. And then the design comes to
sort of serve what what that communication is, you know, and so it was like this,
this breakdown. And I, I noticed this over and over again, especially now that like,
you know, going back to what you said about your wife, like being a copywriter,
like sometimes it's these certain disciplines can get kind of taken for granted or
undervalued, you know, and it's kind of a problem across like different teams and
industries where we need to figure out how to work better together and there's value
to each but sometimes you need to negotiate, you know, sometimes what comes first
and what you're building off of. And it's just interesting how these things sort of
go across industries and teams and disciplines, you know? - Definitely. - Yeah,
that's what brought to mind for me, just the idea that a design engineer sort of
exists in that space between the fidelity of your prototype or the fidelity of your
design and seeing it like implemented on the web, and your design system can help
facilitate some of that process as well. I'm curious if you ever see in any
possible future, if design tools will ever be good enough that it almost steals a
lot of the thunder of the design
If you ever think we'll get to a space where the designer can basically using their
design tools, whatever it might be, Figma, whatever, they can create a prototype so
high fidelity that we almost don't need that gap to be bridged between the prototype
and the solution. Do you think design tools will ever get to that place? I mean,
they're doing a damn fine job of getting there, like, you know, tools like Figma
and like, even being like a minority like fan of sketch and stuff.
And like even like, probably a pinnacle is like Framer and tools like that, that
are trying really hard to like make design tools do code.
And I think that's really good, but I think there is still a gap that needs to
coerce that design and those pieces into something that is going to hit the mark
for accessibility and performance and all of those kinds of hallmarks hallmarks of a
good and well -made site, but at the same time,
as we get closer and closer, it's going to get better and better. It isn't going
to be on the pale that Figma will allow options to say what component does this
mean? Is this an article? Is this a section? Is this a heading? Like, what level
is this heading? And, like, inferring meaning to those will then produce, like, good
semantics and we'll get closer and closer. Like, you know, it would be,
I guess it would be probably a bit too naive to, like, be stubborn enough to say,
oh, we will always be needed. No, not necessarily, like, I mean,
you know, it may already be like happening a little bit way now that like,
you know, same with like print, like that's the one that jumps to mine, like print
is like kind of becoming more like niche.
And like, I kind of like, I'm kind of cool with that because I did print like
design back in the day, like in my first years of like my career. Um, like we
were cranking out so much like low quality stuff and it seemed almost like wasteful
that like, you know, maybe these things become a little bit more like niche and
tinkery and like, uh, hobbyist and stuff. And like when we come to do the big
beefy work that we have these nice tools to like help us get the job done that
like, you know, so we can clock off at 5 .30 and live our lives and not have to
like learn every hour of the day and like have to like keep on top of it that
like these tools help us to get the work done so you can, you work to live,
you don't live to work. Right. Yeah, that's great. I'm curious if,
because I almost see it in in terms of Figma's trying to come at it from the
design perspectives, trying to squeeze the design engineer from the design perspective.
And AI tools are trying to squeeze the UX engineer, the design engineer from the
code perspective. And I genuinely don't know what's going to happen,
but design engineers are getting squeezed from both sides by different tools and
different companies. So it's maybe not the most optimistic perspective,
but I do just feel like there's gonna be value moving forward because there's
always, there's just an incredible bounty of terrible websites on the web right now.
And no matter how good the tools get, there's always going to be space for high
quality product.
Dave, if you had to rename design engineer, what would you call it?
Web developer.
Web developer, like, you know, like, Yeah, like we were all we were all like
underneath in some way like, you know, like there's designers out there You know to
bear code. Yeah, but yeah, you make stuff for the web like you know web creator
something like that something cuz
Something more like modest Yep, that makes total sense Dave.
Thanks so much for taking some time today, and for folks that are interested in
your work, where can they check you out online? Yeah, you can check me out.
My website is dan .es, so that's d -a -r -n .es, and then I also have this,
like, adjacent blog that I've been doing, like, extra design system articles, and
that's designsystems .wtf. It was a project that I did with the folks at Zero Height
and they've kindly allowed me to kind of keep it going as like a side project type
of thing. So I'll be blogging and doing newsletter stuff there. Oh, I guess one
more question. If somebody's really itching to do the Dave Darn's call out,
is there an 800 number they could call and do recording or? Well, if you taking
auditions, yeah, yeah, I mean, if you go down to the form, the contact form at the
bottom, there might be a way to submit a file and that file might allow you to be
played back using the technology that is web components. Nice. I don't know if
they're going to, if they're going to beat Zach's, but, you know, it's where I'm
I'm gonna, yeah, do you accept .exe files? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - A couple of them.
- DirectX. - I'm aware that I can send to you. - Yeah.
- Nice.