About
Design engineer in Copenhagen. I design an interface and then I build it, and I have never been able to keep those two halves apart for long.
Copenhagen, February 2026.
- Based in
- Copenhagen
- Currently
- Vellum
- Writing since
- 2018
I am a design engineer, which is an awkward title for the thing I actually do: I design an interface and then I build it, and I have never been able to keep those two halves apart for long.
I started as a designer who could not hand off. A spec is a lossy format — you can describe a transition in a document, but you cannot feel it until it exists, and the thing you feel is almost never the thing you described. So I learned to build, and then I stopped writing specs, and the work got better.
What I work on
Editors, mostly. Text selection, collaborative cursors, the way a document behaves when two people are inside it at once. Before that, a design system for hospital wards, which taught me more about constraints than any product ever has. Before that, research tooling for a distributed team who were losing almost everything they learned.
The thread through all of it is interfaces where the material fights back. A text editor is not a form. A ward screen is not a laptop. When the medium has opinions, the design gets specific, and specific is where the interesting work lives.
How I work
Small teams, short cycles, a running thing by the end of the first week. I do not believe in the design phase. I believe in building something badly on Monday and being embarrassed by it on Friday, because that embarrassment carries more information than a month of documents.
I write here every few weeks, usually about something that annoyed me while making it work.
Where I have worked
-
Design engineer
Vellum
Building the editor: text selection, collaborative cursors, and the parts of a document that have to feel like paper.
2024 — now
-
Product designer
Northlight Health
Design systems and clinical documentation for hospital wards. Learned to design for a room instead of a laptop.
2022 — 2024
-
Front-end engineer
Fieldnote
Research tooling for a small distributed team. Shipped the first version of what later became Casefile.
2020 — 2022
-
Designer
Independent
Interface work for startups in Copenhagen and Berlin, mostly the difficult second version of a product.
2018 — 2020
What I use
A short list, kept short on purpose.
- Figma
- Thinking, not specifying.
- Zed
- Everything else.
- Tailwind
- Since v0.7, unrepentantly.
- Rive
- When motion needs a timeline.
- Blackwing 602
- Margins only.
- Nikon FM2
- Portra 400, badly metered.
Say hello
I read everything and reply to most of it. Notes about something I wrote are especially welcome, particularly the ones telling me I am wrong.
theo@theobrandt.co