Devs: A Call to Unleash the Trapped Designer within You
Kai's Howdy World #5: Guest Post by Dillion Verma
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you and what do you like to do for fun?
Hey! My name's Dillion and I like to build things. I quit my full-time job as a software engineer in September 2022 and have been building digital and SaaS products ever since.
For fun I like to train at the gym, play FPS games, travel and cook new recipes.
Can you share the story of magic UI? How did it start?
Magic UI started as a side project when I was faced with a problem while building my first SaaS product llm.report. I needed to build a landing page and I had a particular style in mind which I wanted it to have but there were no existing libraries or frameworks to help me achieve my style. To be more specific, I was inspired by the Linear landing page and I wanted mine to look similar but there were no libraries which had animations and microinteractions built in just like Linear’s.
I ended up stitching a few videos together of existing landing pages I liked and then posting a tweet on my twitter account that I will be building and selling components. I had nothing built at that point but I put a stripe payment link in the tweet for pre-orders in case anyone was interested.
On X you wrote “i just took took a real hard look at magicui design and thought: "huh - I might actually just be a designer trapped in a developer's brain."
How many years of software engineering have you done before this realization? What are signs that other developers might be trapped designers?
Haha, that was a funny realization.
I think I always knew that I liked to make things. I was good at art and music in school. I also particularly loved video editing, using that as a tool for many of my class projects. As I got older, I prioritized career and financial growth, particularly focusing on learning hard skills such as programming to eventually make money in the tech industry.
I've been programming since 2016 which is about 8 years in total until the present day (August, 2024). I started my bachelors degree in Computer Science in 2016 which led me to practice programming heavily. I also worked at a couple companies as a software engineer too including NVIDIA and Shopify which gave me good industry experience.
While focusing hard on career and finances, I lost touch with my creative side until I realized I unconsciously rekindled it by building Magic UI. Magic UI is just a manifestation of my naturally creative tendencies put towards making something useful for others.
Other signs that developers might be trapped designers are if you tend to enjoy frontend development relative to backend development. I noticed that those who naturally lean towards frontend development are very creative whereas those who naturally lean towards backend development are more analytical and logical.
What programs and tools do you use every day? What’s your #1 place for inspiration for design?
Cursor, with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Figma, Arc Browser
#1 place for inspiration for design is by learning from existing designs. I maintain a list of websites which I love of which I've listed a few below: Linear, Authkit, Clerk, Antimetal, Rework.ai, Dimension.dev.
Aside from these websites, I also follow particular designers and developers on twitter which often provide a lot of insight into good design principles and related resources. Here are a few: oguzyagizkara, jamesm, JohnPhamous.
What’s your design process when you’re starting a new project? Any particular advice for developers who really suck at design, what should they do? (other than digging through Magic UI 😉)
Honestly, for the past 2 years I've had to prioritize speed above all else since I needed to build products which could financially sustain me. In doing so, I had to sacrifice formal processes and take shortcuts.
Right now, my design process is I open my code editor and start developing + designing things until I think they look good. I frequently refer back to my inspiration list for new design concepts and ideas to explore while directly implementing them with my own taste.
For developers who suck at design, I definitely recommend "imitating" or taking inspiration from other designs which you like so you can internalize and eventually develop your own "taste". It gets easier with time.
Can you breakdown a design concept with a metaphor that devs will understand?
Good design is just consistency, balance, order, and symmetry.
Bad design is just inconsistency, chaos, unorder, and asymmetry.
As a developer trying to design things, try thinking of good design as a bunch of constants and rules which come together to build something more beautiful.
What’s an interesting trend that you’re seeing among design engineers?
Design engineering itself is a relatively new niche in programming. An interesting trend I'm seeing is more people are identifying with the term in general and it's even becoming a role companies hire for which is pretty cool!
Good design engineers are well versed in tools like figma, and react, but the 100x design engineers have training in motion design and animation on top! Some interesting tools to look into are rive.app and adobe after effects.
What’s the best advice you’ve heard recently?
Progress over perfection.
Focus on what you can control.
Howdy - Kai here!
What a great interview! I really loved the part about Dillion rekindling his creative side and finding a way to make it useful for others. I hope one day I can do the same with getting in tune with my technical side!
I liked that Dillion started on a path to build llm.report and had to tap into his design side to make it happen. His main quest stemmed into a side quest, which evolved into something bigger. Magic UI is becoming the go-to UI library for startup landing pages. Some have collectively raised ~$10 million USD already!
In honor of happy accident paths, my goodbye goodies are a random collection of inspo tangents!
Goodbye Goodies
Dillion connected me with Stephen Haney, prev. head of product engineer of WorkOS and I found his really neat Summoners game, which is sort of like a Hearthstone deck building game. Truly free to play - no tokens needed!
SVGator is a free SVG animation creator online, no coding necessary
MESH is a simple way to create beautiful, unique gradients using shaders
Ricky Robinett shared a clip of his 8-year-old daughter learning to code in cursor. She was able to build a chatbot in 45 minutes! Check it out.
Shameless plug: This Friday, Aug 30, I’m hosting a lunch networking mixer to pair designers and devs together for learning chats! RSVP HERE
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Love it!
Thanks for putting this together and great work on the visuals :)
Loved reading this interview.