This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.
This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.
Why we picked it
Summarized from the original emilkowalski/skills SKILL.md by Emil Kowalski; the original upstream instructions were used.
What it helps with
Use this workflow when the task matches the original Design Engineering instructions.
Before you use it
Read the original SKILL.md and referenced files in emilkowalski/skills.
Sources & references
Original sources are linked below. Practical starting points are editorial suggestions from SkillHey.
Audit and fix visual hierarchy, spacing, color, and depth in web UIs. Use when the user mentions "my UI looks off" (or amateur/unprofessional), "fix the design", "Tailwind styling", "color palette", "visual hierarchy", "design system", "spacing scale", or "component styling". Also trigger when building consistent design tokens, creating dark mode themes, improving data-visualization clarity, or polishing UI details before launch. Covers grayscale-first workflow, constrained design scales, shadows, and component styling. For typeface selection, see web-typography. For usability audits, see ux-heuristics.
Use for UI design and implementation work to avoid generic AI-looking interfaces. Provides anti-slop rules, a required discovery phase before coding, and guidance for layout, typography, color, motion, accessibility, dashboards, tables, landing pages, theming, and polish. Trigger when editing UI code or reviewing and refining components, pages, screens, layouts, animations, responsive behavior, or design systems.