Design engineer

Caleb Smith

Case studyVimUI, a design system in code →

Case studyDesign rules that enforce themselves →

I design products and write the frontend code they're built from.

What have I built recently?

VimUI — Vimocity's design system. 50+ web components, fully tokenized with Tailwind CSS and documented in Storybook. Case study: VimUI, a design system in code

What makes me different?

I'm a designer who rarely opens Figma. I design with prototypes that use real components, so engineering gets working frontend code to use rather than a design spec to rebuild. Currently, about 80% of what I prototype ships. Case study: Design rules that enforce themselves

What's my process?

I take a feature from idea to working code: research, strategy, testing with customers, then building the frontend. I work closely with other product managers, backend developers, and leadership to decide what's worth building.

Check out some of my work

Case study2025–2026

Design rules that enforce themselves

One standard, enforced three ways — loaded into the agent, checkable on demand, and gated before merge. Built twice, for the product and for the component library.

Design systems, AI tooling

Claude Code Skills
ESLint
Design tokens

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Case study2022–present

VimUI, a design system in code

Vimocity's design system — 50+ web components on shared tokens, documented in Storybook, which replaced the Figma file as the source of truth.

Design systems

Storybook
Tailwind CSS
shadcn/ui
Radix

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Case study2023–2024

Challenge admin, tools so customers don't need us

A self-serve tool for building challenges, picking raffle winners, and sending the whole email sequence — so running one stops being a support request.

Product design, internal tools

Web app
Figma

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Case study2023–2024

Challenges, getting utility workers moving

Daily 5 completions rose 65% — movement challenges built so a five-person crew can beat a fifty-person one, and so nobody has to be ranked to take part.

Product design, behavior change

Web app
Mobile
Figma

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Case study2025

One login for three platforms

Login and account-access support tickets dropped 80% — one flow replacing three, built so forgetting your password isn't a reset and forgetting your email isn't a dead end.

Product design, cross-platform

Figma
WebView
SSO
MFA

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Case study2026

Rebuilding the Vimocity web app

Migrated every page of the Vimocity portal into our new monorepo — rebuilt on VimUI against the live APIs, using Claude Code to read the legacy logic page by page.

Frontend, platform migration

Web app
Next.js
Tailwind CSS
VimUI

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Storybook

VimUI, live (opens in a new tab)

Vimocity's design system, public — 50+ web components on shared tokens.

About this site

Colophon

The stack, the alternatives that lost, and what each choice cost.

About this site

Style guide

Tokens, type, and every component — measured live, in whichever theme you are viewing.

Profile

LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)

Background, roles, and the longer version of all this.

TL;DR about me

I’m a design engineer and product manager at Vimocity, a workplace health and safety platform based in Seattle. I lead design there. I built our design system — VimUI — and I maintain the standards and automated checks that keep our design and code in sync.

Nine years in design, five writing production frontend.

My experience →