emil-design-eng
A skill from Emil Kowalski, design engineer at Linear and author of Sonner, the React toast library sitting above 13 million weekly downloads. It does not hand your agent a taste checklist, it hands it a thinking order: what this screen is for, which state it has to make legible, and only then which motion or spacing serves that. Most of the material covers animation and component design, extracted from his own open source libraries.
Strengths
- Written by a practitioner whose work you can audit: Sonner and Vaul are open source and readable
- Carries the upstream reasoning (intent, state, hierarchy) where other design skills start from the output
- Strong on motion and micro-interactions, a rare angle among design skills
Limitations
- Heavily React and web oriented, so it transfers poorly to native or to a non-web design system
- A single author personal skill, with no maintenance guarantee and no stable versioning
Best for
- Components that are technically clean but say nothing
- React front-ends where motion and state drive perceived quality
- Designers and PMs who want the agent to decide what to build before building it