Design engineering with SwiftUI

Exercises in designing an interface from scratch and building it in SwiftUI, one detail at a time.

Start with the glass button

Events. Come and see it built, in person.

WTF is design engineering?

An intro to native design engineering

Sat, 17 Oct · 12–2 PM
The Circle.Work, Koramangala
40 seats

RSVP

Breakdowns. From a blank canvas to shipping SwiftUI.

iPhone Duo · Part 1

Folding a flat iPad screen like a book

A gyro-driven hinge and a progressive blur that leads the tilt. The fold behind the iPhone Duo concept.

iPhone Duo · Part 2

Rebuilding the Duo as a mini OS, with Mail

Native-size layouts, tokens from the kit, apps that zoom out of their icons, and Mail that changes posture on tilt.

Figma · Part 1

Designing a glass button, layer by layer

Four steel strokes, a blurred core and one shadow. Every layer of the button above, rebuilt in Figma.

SwiftUI · Part 2

Building the glass button in SwiftUI

The same layers as code: metrics, gradients, reflection and motion, with the full source.

SwiftUI walkthrough

A glassy date selector, step by step

Two Swift files, smart labels like Today and Tomorrow, haptics and accessibility.

Rive · SwiftUIIn progress

Floating balloons with Rive scripting

Touch-driven balloons scripted in Rive and running natively inside a SwiftUI app.

Playground. Whole apps, rebuilt to learn how they feel.

SwiftUI · Open source

YouTube Playground

A SwiftUI YouTube clone that started as a Lottie splash experiment — then grew into home, Shorts, create sheet, and profile chrome, measured in Figma and filled with real portfolio motion.

SwiftUI · Open source

Pinterest Playground

A Pinterest-style SwiftUI app that began as a Figma-to-code exercise and shipped as a native prototype — masonry grid, pin-to-detail motion, Rive splash, real haptics.

Design engineering

Design engineering is designing an interface and building it in code yourself, so nothing gets lost between the design and the app people use.

designengineer.ing is a set of exercises in that practice: design something from scratch, then build it in SwiftUI, with every decision that makes it feel right on a phone. Start with the glass button design breakdown and the SwiftUI engineering breakdown, or open-source playground apps like YouTube and Pinterest.