Derek Wood Design Engineer

Hi, I'm Derek.

I've spent most of my career moving back and forth between design and engineering. Sometimes I start by figuring out what something should be and then how to build it. Sometimes I get the thing working first and come back around to the interface and visual system. Depending on the year, people called that a front-end developer, creative technologist, product designer, or just the person who could figure it out.

Some years that meant building a weird interactive thing for a campaign that only needed to live for a few weeks. Other times it meant designing something that had to become a real system and survive years of new features, new people, and changing requirements. Doing both taught me when to move fast, when to slow down, how much system the thing needs, and how to leave it in a state the next person can understand and keep working on.

Eventually I got interested enough in that overlap to build a school around it. At Perpetual Education, I taught designers how the web actually works and developers how typography, hierarchy, interaction, and visual systems work. Teaching it over and over also gave me a ridiculous amount of time to test my own ideas about how design and engineering should fit together. Learning both together is actually easier. You start to understand why the other person is making the decisions they're making.

The scale of that work depends on the product and the team. Sometimes the gap is down at the HTML level: what a screen reader announces, how an interaction behaves, or getting a tiny animation right. Sometimes it's much bigger: architecture, component systems, or how something needs to work across products and platforms. I'm comfortable moving between those levels.

You can hand me a drawing on a napkin and we can start there: figure out how the thing should work, get enough of the foundation in place to try it, and then get everybody in there pushing it around. On a larger team, maybe my part is much narrower. That's fine too. I don't care whose idea wins. I care that we can actually try the ideas, find out what works, and write down what we learned.

After about 15 years of this, pull me into the weird meeting. Show me the thing that's driving everybody nuts. I'll figure out where I can be useful, get the right people involved, and help get it unstuck.

Thanks for reading.

Derek Thomas Wood