Coordinate several elements that animate together — decide what moves, in what order, how much they overlap, and what stays still — so a group reads as one intentional motion instead of a pile of separate animations. Use when building or fixing a staggered…
Build an animation from scratch, making the decisions in the order that determines whether it feels right — should it animate at all, what purpose, which tool, which properties, which curve and duration, how it interrupts, how it exits. Writes the…
Keep web animations inside the frame budget — animate composite-only properties, keep motion off the main thread when the page is busy, and find the cause when an animation drops frames. Covers the layout/paint/composite pipeline, cheaper property swaps, CSS…
This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.
Survey a codebase's animation and motion code as a senior motion advisor, then produce a prioritized audit and self-contained implementation plans for other agents (or cheaper models) to execute. Read-only on source code — it plans improvements, it does not…
Reviews animation and motion code against a high craft bar derived from Emil Kowalski's design engineering philosophy. Default to flagging; approval is earned.
Find the animations an interface doesn't need and remove them — motion on keyboard actions, high-frequency surfaces, functional data, and decoration with no purpose — then clean up what they leave behind. Edits code, but only to subtract; it never adds or…
Try to break a piece of UI by feeding it worst-case data — long names, unbreakable emails, one-letter names, missing fields, huge counts, zero items, long labels, non-Latin text, emoji, extreme numbers — then render it behind a "Demo data / Worst case" toggle…
