Thank you for being patient! As many of you may know, d×e is a side project for Hugo and I, so we aim to do what we can when we can, inbetween our day jobs. We're now in a position to release our first major useful features, particularly for hiring managers. Design Engineering/Design Technology/UI Engineering and any other permutation of the role is traditionally difficult to hire for because hiring managers are trying to hire two types of role in one; a design and an engineer. Typical job specs or tasks don't often suit the needs of this hybrid role and so we want to make that easier for you. We've spent months training AI to understand the nuances of these roles and to provide useful and reliable responses. As with all things AI, the more detail you feed into the inputs, the more useful the output you get, but we aim to save you a lot of the hassle. Job Spec Generator We've built a tool that makes it far easier to generate job posts for Design Engineer roles (or any of the other permutations of the title). The outputs can be copied directly and used on a platform of your choice, or, you can submit the job directly to us via the Submit Job button and we'll provide an easy link to where its hosted. The External Job Posting URL field should contain a link to the external post on a platform such as Workday or Indeed. Task Builder Our custom task builder tool aims to make it easy to come up with tasks that a candidate could complete. Unlike our Job Spec Generator, Task Builder is conversational, so you can add more detail and iterate on the tasks as you need to. We provide some prompt examples, and you'll likely find in most cases that even with little prompting, you'll get a useful and powerful result. You can copy any of the individual responses directly using the copy button and then do with them what you need to. Conversations Blog Posts (and our upcoming Stories feature) now utilise Clerk and Liveblocks to enable the ability to leave comments and have conversations in threads. We see this as the future of immersing you in the content, and as a way to allow you to discuss things in a greater context beyond the typical end-of-post thread. You can read more about how we built this out and why here. Once you're signed up and then signed in, you'll be able to have these conversations. Hopefully these tools provide value to hiring managers and start to bridge the challenge gap with hiring for Design Engineering, UI Engineer, Design Technologist or any of the other hybrid roles. And hopefully Conversations starts to create a space for you to have engaging discussions about our content, with the ability to share your own thoughts and ideas on how you might do something differently. We'll be introducing more useful content soon, but in the mean time, have a play and let us know what you think! Thanks again, and until next time!
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Issue No. 2—Recap
Articles & VideosIn a nice little Essay, Dylan Smith breaks down his approach around how Designers should code: Learn enough HTML, CSS, & JavaScript to communicate with devs, create interactive prototypes & boost career ops. Start with online resources, practice & collab with devs. Andy Bell teaches us how to recreate a complex hero grid layout from Dribbble using CSS Grid, absolute positioning, z-index, and pseudo-elements! Break down the design, leverage Grid for structure, and get creative with layering effects. Reality Check #3: Building out a layered hero grid layout from Dribbble - Piccalilli Social post of the WeekWe. Couldn't. Agree. More... https://x.com/ilikescience/status/1781314452383481877 Job PostingsWe’ve added a series of recent job posting, most notably for Zed, Restream, TAILWIND (not the CSS framework…) and Character.ai. We’re not going to continue to heavily update third-party posts on the site given the lack of API support and fluctuation of roles. Instead, we’re focusing on making it easier to understand how to hire Design Engineers into your team. We’ll be sunsetting these third-party job posts in the near future. If you’re thinking of applying to one of these jobs but you’re still a little wary or unsure about Design Engineering as a role, reply to this email with your worries and we can have a chat! In the meantime, Sean Voisen shared some great resources here. See you next time!
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Issue No. 1—RecapThe first edition. Probably shouldn’t put too much emphasis on this, but it’s important for setting the tone. Probably helps if we introduce ourselves, and videos tend to do this better than the written word. Well, in most instances. Check it out on So now you know how the project came about, we’re keen to hear from this early audience; what do you wanna see? How do you wanna get involved? Get at us in the tweets, the emails or even the DM’s (@_hraymond or @_kejk — honestly the underscores were completely accidental). The format of these things is probably going to change a lot in the next few, but we’re gonna try and be good, and try and get this into your inbox once a fortnight. Should be easy, right? Articles & VideosWe rediscovered an older video about Design Technologists from Clarity Conf in 2021. Great content that really hits to the challenge of the perceived ‘Design → Engineering gap’. Here’s Chat GPT’s summary of it: "The concept of a 'design and engineering gap' is common in the design systems world, but this could be solved with the introduction of Design Technologists. These individuals are skilled in both design and research best practices and also have the ability to create accessible, scalable components with APIs that engineering teams can utilize. The key is that they already understand the 'language' of both design and engineering. This summary suggests that Design Technologists can strengthen and unify teams across an organization. It encourages everyone to adopt a Design Technologist's mindset regardless of their job title."
Social post of the WeekWe saw a pretty awesome post from Parker Gibbons this week showing how he used Perplexity AI to handle some clever Mock → Build flows, including the new Dev Mode annotations from Figma.
Site UpdateAdded Job PostingsThis is the newest edition to the site, recognising that the more people are talking about some remix of the words Design, Engineers, Technologist, UI/UX or “Creative” (just please don’t fucking call us Unicorns, because we actually exist) the more we’re seeing jobs (yay! paid work!) Bare with us though, in spite of us being mystical creatures, we set this up manually not magically (for now). If you’ve seen a listing and thought, “This is cool, and I don’t mind some healthy competition” or “I’m not actually looking right now.” then submit it over ‘ere.
Added ResourcesIn prep for our own hosted content (coming soon!), we’ve relocated the external posts to a new Resources section along with a couple of other helpful platforms we’ve found. For now, the original Posts are still in the same Posts section of the site, but once we’re ready this’ll be a space for brand new content. If you’d like to contribute to that content, send us an email. Add Stories placeholderWe’ve got some exciting content coming in the form of “Stories”. We’ll have more to share on this soon too, but for now, you’ll just have to be patient... If you want to get involved, you can both submit an article you’ve written or found, or a job posting via the relevant page sections for Posts and Jobs. Fire ‘em over! Until next time! Karl & Hugo
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