The line between designer and design engineer is blurry. Tommy Smith offers a practical benchmark to overcome imposter syndrome: if you can build interactions and components robust enough to hand off to another developer for production use, you absolutely qualify as a design engineer.
Tommy added a non-essential but beautifully crafted progress bar to his case studies. This 'easter egg' interaction, while likely missed by many, serves as a powerful green flag for discerning hiring managers, signaling a deep commitment to craft that goes beyond the minimum requirements.
Instead of fearing AI, design engineers should leverage it to automate boilerplate and foundational code. This frees up mental energy and time to focus on what truly matters: crafting the nuanced, high-quality interactions and animations that differentiate a product and require human creativity.
Tommy Smith intentionally featured his side project over professional work to escape being typecast. This strategy allowed him to demonstrate the skills he wanted to use in his next role, proving that personal projects can be more powerful than client work for career progression.
An interaction can look perfect in a static tool like Figma but feel terrible when built. Prototyping allows designers to experience the 'feel' of their work鈥攁 crucial step for validating ideas, developing intuition, and creating higher-quality products that you can't get from static mockups alone.
Instead of using stock assets, Tommy Smith invested time in creating his own icon set. He now uses it across all his projects, giving his work a unique, consistent identity that is distinctly his. This high-leverage project serves as a key differentiator and personal branding tool.
To master front-end development, Tommy Smith built a calendar app鈥攁 notoriously complex project. By tackling challenges like time zones and deep logic head-on, he used the side project as a deliberate learning tool to quickly level up his skills in a way a simpler project never could have.