matthew scullino

The reason why my personal site has just one font size, monchrome colors, and looks “boring” is simply because I don’t consider myself a great designer. By using as little variation as possible, I limit the amount of design mistakes I can make, and instead, I try to make the content itself (hopefully) interesting. I know a few tricks to not make my work look like shit, but it’s far from the skills of a designer working at Linear for example. To expand on that, from what I’ve seen, most “design engineers” excel at either design or code, not both. I never believed I can be exceptional at both, and I haven’t seen many people that are really, really great at both. To me, trying to be great at both is like 2-in-1 shampoo conditioner, it never really works as well as two separate products designed specifically to do one thing well. That’s why I made open source projects like Sonner and Vaul, that require some design sense, but these are far from sharing design kits for example. And again, there are exceptions, but you shouldn’t expect all design engineers to design and build absolutely amazing things on their own. I think most design engineers (including me) are just engineers that care about design, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at designing (and vice versa). To me, the title design engineer is misleading in that it’s more of a description of where one’s interests overlap instead of actually indicating high skill in both disciplines.