Emil KowalskiSimple ideas you can use to improve your animations.
Summary
Emil's early assumption was that good animation is a knack you either have or you do not. This piece is the counter-argument, in the form of seven specific moves you can apply today. Scale a button to 0.97 on press so the interface feels like it is listening. Never start from scale(0), because nothing appears out of nothing. Drop the delay on a second tooltip once the first is already open. The rest cover easing, hover behaviour and the small corrections that add up.
View full writingGoes 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