design eng club newsletter: 2026 updates
hello world, again!
We’re kicking this newsletter up again, experimenting with getting into a regular cadence of sharing cool events, design engineering opportunities, and highlighting stories/journeys of other design engineers in the space. We’d love to hear your feedback on how this newsletter can be valuable to you. Just hit reply to get in touch with us.
With that, here’s our March 2026 issue.
recent highlights
Last fall, design eng club co-hosted some events in SF and NYC!
Building Interactive Interfaces + Art, at telos.haus, in NYC
We hosted a cozy demo night in Brooklyn where we had some creatives from the community share the cool things they’ve been working on! Here’s all the demos:
Chia did a cool interactive art performance, called desktop dreaming, a system built from 100+ personal sketches
Emily & Justin presented portrait of you, living digital portraits that detoritate based on screen time.
Mathurah demoed Figma for words, a spatial canvas that transforms a sentence across an axis to adjust tone, complexity, and emotional resonance
Anna made a collaborative digital garden that anyone on the internet can add flowers to (but they have to be flowers!)
Christina shared recursive flora, a zine and data visualization app centered around overthinking
Tina built a teenage-engineering inspired mixer that makes cool combinations of melodies and music
Vardnan created an AI reading tool grounded in the principles of learning and cognitive science
Connie shared link dump an ephemeral link canvas that stops you from hoarding links forever, that acts as a transient file storage for creatives
Helen presented called home, an interactive, poetic web experience reflecting on the end of life
Filip prototyped a new way to visualize AI thinking states with a blurred streaming carousel
Design Eng Roundtable: Building Agentic Interfaces, SF
Flo & Anna from paradigm hosted a design engineering rountable focused on designing for agentic interfaces. The awesome panelists were Ilan Bigio (OpenAI), Liam Matteson (Browserbase), Anna Monaco (Paradigm), Jason Ginsberg (Cursor), and Silas Alberti (Cognition).
Read the takeaways here!
upcoming events
SF: Next Wednesday, March 11th, we’re hosting an evening around the untold origins of the smartphone - RSVP here!
We’re bringing together a room full of designers, engineers, and creatives to screen the award-winning General Magic documentary: the story of the 1990s Apple spin-off that built the precursor to the modern smartphone 15 years too early. They pioneered touchscreens, icons, email, and early app ecosystems. While the company dissolved in 2002, its alumni went on to create the iPod, iPhone, Android, eBay, and Nest.
The screening will be preceded by a live panel conversation with General Magic’s co-founder and CEO, Marc Porat, along with Mike Stern, early General Magic team member and movie producer, moderated by Soleio.
Will be a cozy event with limited spots, register asap if you’re in town and want to join!
resources & cool reads
Design engineering takes a village! Sharing some cool articles/resources we’ve come across in the wild that might be cool to check out. If you have any recs, reply here so we can include them in the next issue:
Building Halftone Effects with Shaders, by Maxime
Interface Craft by Josh
Going Beyond Prototyping - Interview with Nate Parrot, Anthropic
The design process is dead, here’s what’s replacing it - Interview with Jenny Wen, Anthropic
opportunities
Some open roles for design engineers! Reach out to us if you have a role you’d like to submit for the next newsletter.
The Browser Company is hiring design engineers to shape the look and feel of the Dia browser
Interaction Co. is hiring design engineers to work on the web app/iOS experience for Poke (poke.com). Email miles@interaction.co if you’re interested in the role!
Vercel is seeking both designers and design engineers to work on Vercel and V0.
Doji, a fashion app, is hiring design engineers to work its Doji mobile experience.
Sway is looking for a design engineer to help make democracy look good.
Profound is hiring a design engineer to lead the design of their marketing website.
Google Design is hiring for their creative fellowship.
Github is hiring design engineers to work on the future of software dev.
Braintrust is hiring design engineers to work on their AI observability & evals platform.
see you on the internet!
In the meantime, keep building cool things—and if you come across interesting design engineering work, opportunities, or resources, send them our way. We read every reply.
We’re also rolling out invites to our online community on a rolling basis. Join here!