What are Emil Kowalski's Claude Code skills?

Claude Code will ship a working React component and still leave it feeling cheap: instant state changes, wrong easing, shadows that fight the light. Emil Kowalski's skills are the most-installed answer to that gap in the best skills for frontend and design.

Key takeaways

• emil-design-eng leads the set at 250,523 installs (skills.sh registry), from emilkowalski/skills with 35,431 GitHub stars.
• The ten skills in the repo total more than 1.1 million installs, which puts them among the most adopted design skills in the frontend and design category.
• Six of the ten are about motion. review-animations (140,187 installs) is the audit step; animate (58,679) is the writing step.
• animation-vocabulary (127,930 installs) exists so you and the agent use the same words for easing, spring and duration. Compare it against the rest of the animation and motion hub.
• Load one or two at a time. Ten skills in context costs tokens on every turn and blurs the instruction the agent actually needs.

Who is Emil Kowalski and why do these skills rank so high?

Emil Kowalski is a design engineer whose open source React work is widely used, and the skills carry that specific point of view rather than generic design advice. The emil-design-eng description in our catalog points at years of work at Vercel and Linear, and one skill, ask-sonner (43,364 installs), answers API questions about the Sonner toast library he maintains. Adoption backs the reputation: 250,523 installs on the lead skill alone (skills.sh registry), against 35,431 stars on the repo (GitHub).

What is the best Emil Kowalski skill for Claude Code?

emil-design-eng is the one to install first, at 250,523 installs (skills.sh registry) and 35,431 repo stars (GitHub). It makes the agent answer four questions before it writes motion: is this animation necessary, what does it communicate, which easing fits, and how fast should it run. It then applies component rules such as never animating from scale(0), and reports changes in a Before / After / Why table.

npx skills add https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills --skill emil-design-eng

Two strong alternatives: review-animations at 140,187 installs when you already have motion and want it audited, and apple-design at 121,381 installs when the target is restraint rather than personality. The full ranked set sits on the best skills for frontend and design page.

How do the animation skills differ from each other?

Each one covers a different moment in the work, which is why installing all six at once is wasteful. find-animation-opportunities (99,920 installs) scans an existing interface for places where motion would carry meaning. animate (58,679 installs) writes the transition. improve-animations (112,450 installs) fixes motion that already exists but reads as sluggish or mechanical. review-animations (140,187 installs) is the gate before merge.

animation-vocabulary (127,930 installs) sits under all four. It gives the agent precise language for easing curves, spring parameters and duration, which is the difference between "make it smoother" and a real instruction. The underlying primitives are documented in the MDN easing-function reference.

Which skill helps you choose a UI library?

pick-ui-library, at 83,853 installs (skills.sh registry), is the decision skill: it weighs component libraries against what the project actually needs instead of defaulting to whatever the model saw most in training. Run it once, at the start of a project. prototype (72,665 installs) is its companion for throwaway explorations you intend to delete. For the broader question of interface structure, the UI design hub collects the rest of the catalog.

A complete starter stack

• emil-design-eng (250,523 installs) as the standing taste layer for any frontend session.
• animation-vocabulary (127,930 installs) so motion feedback is specific.
• review-animations (140,187 installs) as the pre-merge gate.
• pick-ui-library (83,853 installs) once, when the project starts.
• shadcn (271,675 installs, 123,047 stars) as the component layer these skills polish, with more options on the shadcn/ui hub.

Common pitfalls

• Installing all ten skills at once. Every loaded skill spends context on every turn, and the animation skills overlap enough that the agent picks the wrong one.
• Running review-animations after release instead of before merge, which turns an audit into a backlog.
• Treating apple-design as a visual theme. It encodes restraint and hierarchy decisions, so pairing it with a maximalist brand produces a fight, not a design.

Start with emil-design-eng, add the vocabulary skill the first time you disagree with the agent about motion, and keep the rest uninstalled until a specific task calls for them. The source repo is at emilkowalski/skills.

Common questions