Masterclass · On-site
Your designers hand off. Your engineers interpret. Somewhere in the middle the intent dies. We run a fixed-price workshop that turns one of your designers into a design engineer—and the rest of the team follows them there.
Figma Config · San Francisco
Whoever ships the code is upstreamThat’s the argument Frederick made on Figma's stage, and it’s the one this masterclass is built on. Why the handoff is the problem, what happens when you remove it, and what a designer who ships actually changes about how a product gets made.
Your designers are downstream of every decision
By the time design is brought in, the shape of the thing is settled. They’re drawing screens for a call somebody else already made.
The intent dies in the handoff
What ships isn’t what was designed. Not because anyone was careless — because a spec is a lossy format and nobody owns the gap.
You’re trying to hire your way out of a capability problem
Another designer doesn’t close it. Another front-end developer doesn’t either. What closes it is one person who does both, and you cannot reliably hire that person.
Your team knows AI changed the job, but not how
The bar to write working code dropped through the floor. Your designers can feel it. Without a path, that lands as anxiety instead of leverage.
Design keeps getting measured against other design
So it competes on taste and loses budget arguments. It should be measured against the thing it actually replaces: engineering hours.
Six chapters on moving a design team upstream, distilled from a year of client work. The method, the sequence, and the one sentence that turns the room. Free, and you can start on Monday.
No spam. Just the book and occasional design engineering notes.
Team-wide rollouts die in month three. Everyone is enthusiastic, nobody is accountable, and the first hard sprint sends everyone back to what they know.
So we bet on one person instead. We pick the designer most likely to make it real, we build the conditions around them (access, pairing time, a real ticket, cover from their lead) and then we let what they become do the convincing.
It works because nobody argues with a colleague who is visibly better at their job than they were three months ago.
Phase 1
Half a day, on-site
A working session with whoever leads design and whoever leads engineering. We map where product decisions actually get made (not where the org chart says they do) and we find the one designer with both the appetite and the standing to go first.
You leave with: a named champion, and an honest read on whether your engineering team will let this happen.
Phase 2
Two days, on-site
Hands on keyboards, in your repo, with your engineers in the room. Environment, conventions, review, the whole path from idea to merged. Your designers don’t leave with a prototype and a slide deck. They leave having shipped.
You leave with: at least one merged pull request written by a designer, and a documented path for the next person to follow.
Phase 3
90 days async
A habit doesn’t set in two days. Your champion gets a shared channel, fortnightly working sessions, and review on their first real pieces of work — until shipping is just how they work rather than something they were taught.
You leave with: a designer shipping into production without us, and a written case you can take to your exec team.
Tell us where your team is stuck and we’ll tell you honestly whether a workshop is the right move. If it isn’t, we’ll say so.
Frederick Andersen
Founder
A designer who ships. Not a designer who understands code enough to write a better spec — a designer who opens the pull request. The distinction matters because the second one still hands off, and the handoff is where the intent dies.
Teach. If you want us shipping product work alongside your team, that’s our design partnership, and it’s a different engagement with a different price. This one ends with your people doing it without us.
No, and that used to be the blocker. It isn’t any more. The bar to produce working front-end code has dropped far enough that taste and product judgement are the scarce parts — and your designers already have those. What they’re missing is the path, the permission and the conventions.
Some will, and they’re not being unreasonable — it’s their codebase and their on-call. That’s why phase one includes your engineering lead, and why the first thing your champion ships is small, reviewed and boring. Trust gets built on merged PRs, not on a kick-off deck.
Design systems changes your product. Design engineering changes your team. If your UI is inconsistent and your releases are slow, you want a system. If your designers are stuck downstream and you can’t hire your way out of it, you want this. Plenty of clients eventually want both — in that order.
Then you got ninety days of better work and a documented path, and we help you pick the next one. It’s a fair risk to raise, and it’s the reason phase three produces something written rather than something that lives in one person’s head.
From €10,000, quoted as one fixed fee before we start and covering all three phases. For comparison: a senior front-end developer in Denmark costs €90,000-105,000 a year including pension, before recruitment fees (and you still have to find one who thinks like a designer). This is about a quarter of that, and it changes someone you already employ. Travel outside Denmark is billed at cost.
More on this from the studio: read our design systems writing, or browse everything we publish on UX research.
