Design and interface work

This skill encodes Emil Kowalski's philosophy on UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel great.

Design engineering principles for making interfaces feel polished. Use when building UI components, reviewing frontend code, implementing animations, hover states, shadows, borders, typography, icons, micro-interactions, enter/exit animations, or any visual detail work. Supports quick and full review modes. Triggers on UI polish, design details, "make it feel better", "feels off", stagger animations, border radius, optical alignment, font smoothing, tabular numbers, image outlines, box shadows, icons, icon stroke weight, icon states, motion restraint.

Use when the user wants to design, redesign, shape, critique, audit, polish, clarify, distill, harden, optimize, adapt, animate, colorize, extract, or otherwise improve a frontend interface. Covers websites, landing pages, dashboards, product UI, app shells, components, forms, settings, onboarding, and empty states. Handles UX review, visual hierarchy, information architecture, cognitive load, accessibility, performance, responsive behavior, theming, anti-patterns, typography, fonts, spacing, layout, alignment, color, motion, micro-interactions, UX copy, error states, edge cases, i18n, and reusable design systems or tokens. Also use for bland designs that need to become bolder or more delightful, loud designs that should become quieter, live browser iteration on UI elements, or ambitious visual effects that should feel technically extraordinary. Not for backend-only or non-UI tasks.

Review UI code for Web Interface Guidelines compliance. Use when asked to "review my UI", "check accessibility", "audit design", "review UX", or "check my site against best practices".

Audit and fix animation performance issues including layout thrashing, compositor properties, scroll-linked motion, and blur effects. Use when animations stutter, transitions jank, or reviewing CSS/JS animation performance.

Audit and fix HTML accessibility issues including ARIA labels, keyboard navigation, focus management, color contrast, and form errors. Use when adding interactive controls, forms, dialogs, or reviewing WCAG compliance.

Quickly deslop UI code by fixing spacing, hierarchy, typography, and small layout issues. Use when the interface needs a fast cleanup or polish pass.

Anti-AI-slop design skill for greenfield pages, audits, redesigns, and design extraction from URLs or screenshots. Use when the user asks to build a new app or landing page, wants to redesign something, invokes Hallmark by name, or uses audit/redesign/study.

Manages shadcn components and projects — adding, searching, fixing, debugging, styling, and composing UI, including chat interfaces. Provides project context, component docs, and usage examples. Applies when working with shadcn/ui, component registries, presets, --preset codes, or any project with a components.json file. Also triggers for "shadcn init", "create an app with --preset", "switch to --preset", and for building a design system or applying a DESIGN.md or brand spec to shadcn/ui.

Design or review Agent Builder interfaces. Use for Agent configuration patterns, modal flows, responsive behavior, status treatments, and other Agent-only UI work.

Guidelines on designing and building UI. Use when working in editor-ui or design-system packages. Triggers for tasks that include refactoring components, styling changes, or feature work.

Applies Anthropic's official brand colors and typography to any sort of artifact that may benefit from having Anthropic's look-and-feel. Use it when brand colors or style guidelines, visual formatting, or company design standards apply.

Create beautiful visual art in .png and .pdf documents using design philosophy. You should use this skill when the user asks to create a poster, piece of art, design, or other static piece. Create original visual designs, never copying existing artists' work to avoid copyright violations.

Guidance for distinctive, intentional visual design when building new UI or reshaping an existing one. Helps with aesthetic direction, typography, and making choices that don't read as templated defaults.

Chart selection and data visualization guidance for effective data communication. Use when: creating visualizations, choosing chart types, designing dashboards, or when user mentions data visualization, charts, graphs, or needs help presenting data visually.

Design consultation: understands your product, researches the landscape, proposes a complete design system (aesthetic, typography, color, layout, spacing, motion), and generates font+color preview... (gstack)

Design shotgun: generate multiple AI design variants, open a comparison board, collect structured feedback, and iterate. (gstack)

Premium brand-kit image generation skill for creating high-end brand-guidelines boards, logo systems, identity decks, and visual-world presentations. Trained for minimalist, cinematic, editorial, dark-tech, luxury, cultural, security, gaming, developer-tool, and consumer-app brand systems. Optimized for intentional logo concepting, refined composition, sparse typography, strong symbolic meaning, premium mockups, art-directed imagery, and flexible grid layouts.

Raw mechanical interfaces fusing Swiss typographic print with military terminal aesthetics. Rigid grids, extreme type scale contrast, utilitarian color, analog degradation effects. For data-heavy dashboards, portfolios, or editorial sites that need to feel like declassified blueprints.

Elite UX/UI & Advanced GSAP Motion Engineer. Enforces Python-driven true randomization for layout variance, strict AIDA page structure, wide editorial typography (bans 6-line wraps), gapless bento grids, strict GSAP ScrollTriggers (pinning, stacking, scrubbing), inline micro-images, and massive section spacing.

Knowledge about CSS classes, component patterns, and syntax highlighting in the presentation

Build an animation from scratch, making the decisions in the order that determines whether it feels right — should it animate at all, what purpose, which tool, which properties, which curve and duration, how it interrupts, how it exits. Writes the implementation. Use when asked to animate something, add motion, make a component feel alive, or build a transition. For critiquing existing motion use review-animations; for auditing a whole codebase use improve-animations.

Apple's approach to interface design and fluid, physical motion, translated for the web. Use when building or reviewing gesture-driven UI, spring animations, drag/swipe/sheet interactions, momentum and interruptible transitions, translucent materials and depth, typography (optical sizing, tracking, leading), reduced-motion, or the design foundations (feedback, spatial consistency, restraint) behind Apple-style interfaces.

Write Storybook stories for PostHog UI components. Covers the provider stack stories run inside, the key gotcha that tRPC/useHostTRPC queries never resolve in Storybook (so data-fetching components render empty), and the pure-presentational split that makes a component storyable. Use when adding or fixing a *.stories.tsx file under packages/ui.