Emil KowalskiWhy you are animating more often than you should.
The short version
Motion can make an interface feel faster and more predictable, or slower and less trustworthy. The test is purpose: if you cannot say what an animation is for, it should not be there.
Our summary, not the author’s text. The essay itself stays where they published it.
Goes well with
emil-design-eng
The design-engineering house style behind Sonner and Vaul.
Emil's main skill. Mostly animation, with the UI-polish and component judgement that surrounds it: what to build, how far to push it, and when to stop.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills
animate
Builds an animation from scratch, decisions in the order that matters.
Should it animate at all, what purpose, which tool, which properties, which curve and duration, how it interrupts, how it exits. Then writes the implementation.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill animate
review-animations
Reviews your motion strictly, against Emil's rules.
A production-critical pass over animation quality, timing and consistency in a diff. Pairs with improve-animations, which does the same for a whole codebase.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill review-animations
Emil Kowalski