Emil KowalskiWhy taste matters and how to develop it.
Summary
When cars were new nobody cared about the silhouette, because the competition was a horse. Software has reached the same point, so shipping something that works is no longer a differentiator. What separates products now is design, detail and the overall feel, and Emil's argument is that taste is a trained instinct rather than a preference you are born with. He gives three ways to train it: surround yourself with the best work in your field, force yourself to say why something feels good instead of stopping at the feeling, and keep practising while asking better people for critique.
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
prototype
Builds several genuinely different UI variants behind a live picker.
Flip through real implementations instead of arguing about descriptions, then promote the one that wins.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill prototype
apple-design
Apple's interface and motion principles, translated for the web.
Distilled from the WWDC design talks. Gesture-driven UI, spring physics, interruptible transitions, translucent materials, optical sizing and the restraint underneath all of it.
npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill apple-design
Emil Kowalski