A reminder for the solo designer from Seattle Tech Week

I took French from high school into college for about six years. Enough to carry a conversation, and navigate around a French city. But English is my first language, and speaking French all day wears me out.

I'm the sole designer on our team of six (three engineers) and some days the only designer I talk to is Claude Design. Talking with engineers feels a lot like speaking French to me. I carry the conversation, I clarify vocabulary, and I get the information I need to keep moving.

Translating between design and code isn't new; it's the 20-year-old software development "handoff." Designers encode intent into a visual, which they pass along to an engineer who decodes it (all nuance aside). Enter Claude Code, the rise of "design engineering," and the sacred handoff moment… collapses.

An ode to Claude Code

When I decided to become a designer, I never thought I would submit a PR in my life. In my first two weeks at SageOx, I submitted 46.

Thanks to Claude Code, the fate of my work no longer belongs to a dev. My mocks are usable pieces of code, I can fix my own QA issues, and I can enforce a design system down to the CI check.

At SageOx, we've embraced this agentic future emphatically, meaning I'm speaking French constantly now. Not only with my engineering colleagues, but also with my 24/7 conversation partner, Claude. It's deeply exciting, I love working this way, AND it has felt like one exhausting language immersion program.

In spite of my growing technical fluency, code still does not feel like my first language. I feel, speak, and think in design.

Being the only designer means I mostly do that in an echo chamber. And while that can feel a little lonely sometimes, I'm certainly not alone. Learning to work better together is a standing conversation at SageOx, and I'm grateful that the team always has space for feelings, even when moving at 40x velocity.

Turns out Milkana Brace, our CPO, has experienced moments of loneliness, too. As someone who represents several disciplines, she had shared her relief bringing a designer onto the team after being outnumbered 3:1 by engineers: "I'm not the odd one out anymore!"

Birds of a feather

So that's where I was last week, when I went to Still Human: Design in the Age of AI Everything, hosted by Conduit Venture Labs at Tactile. It was, as far as I could tell, the only design-focused event in all of Seattle Tech Week. And for one evening, I was finally in a room where everyone spoke my language.

Seventy-ish designers packed in on couches and standing in the back; I was on a tiny stool maybe two feet from a panelist. The event had a waitlist, which came up as a joke in nearly every conversation I had. We all really needed this.

At some point, the panel went Socratic (we do all ask questions for a living, of course). Someone asked the exact question sitting in my head: everything is moving so fast right now, what do we do with that as designers?

I'm still thinking about the reminder that came from panelist Eric Lawrence, Creative Director at Intentional Futures: design has never been the output; design is the process.

Design isn't the mockup, it's finding the problem. Design isn't the pixels, it's getting close to your users.

Slow by design

I've caught myself measuring my days in merged PRs more than once. PRs come with a neat little number and a pretty purple checkmark when they're merged. Dopamine hits.

Eric reminded me that design work doesn't keep score like that. There are no little numbers ticking up while you sit with a problem (except for, maybe, the seconds on the clock). Design can feel slow, but it's slow by design.

I left the evening with a resolution to lean more into the process, in spite of how the tools have changed. Do the fifty sketches, ask why five times, pull the frameworks off the shelf again.

Even better, ask AI to turn the fifty sketches into a hundred, or ask it to introduce a framework you've never tried. Yesterday before writing any code, I sent Claude Design off to analyze dozens of my inspo screenshots and report back with patterns and pitfalls for us to discuss together. Crit, party of one.

Still, as good of a conversationalist as it is, Claude can't recreate the warm, fuzzy feeling that a room full of designers gives me. So I'm also resolving to make more time for coffee chats and in-person events, even if it means sacrificing a few PRs. More time to speak design.

Let's do this again sometime

I walked into standup the morning after the event feeling inspired: "Let's host a design meetup!" The team's immediate response was "YES!"

So stay tuned for SageOx's first design meetup someday soon. Especially if you could use a break from speaking French, too.