---
title: animations-dev-curriculum
summary: External pointer to Emil Kowalski's animations.dev course. Don't duplicate its content here.
tags: [external, course, motion]
---

# animations.dev — the canonical course

The canonical resource on building animations the way this skill teaches them is Emil Kowalski's [animations.dev](https://animations.dev) course. This node exists to **point to it**, not duplicate it.

## What the course covers

- Animation fundamentals (easing, timing, curves)
- Spring animations and physics
- Gesture and drag
- View transitions
- Choreography across components
- Building production-quality animated UI in React (Motion / Framer Motion) and vanilla CSS

If the user wants depth on motion, send them there.

## Companion projects

- **[Sonner](https://sonner.emilkowal.ski/)** — Emil's toast library. Reference implementation for asymmetric enter/exit, gesture dismissal, and stack management. See its source for production motion patterns.
- **[Vaul](https://vaul.emilkowal.ski/)** — Emil's drawer component for React. Reference implementation for [[gesture-momentum]].
- **[lucide-animated.com](https://lucide-animated.com)** — dmytro / @pqoqubbw, built as practice from the course. 428+ animated React icons demonstrating path-transformation patterns. Reference for icon animation specifically.
- **[transitions.dev](https://transitions.dev)** — Jakub Antalik's catalog of 12 production-ready transitions, framework-agnostic. See [[cross-blur-transitions]], [[compose-subtract-asymmetry]], [[distance-falloff-propagation]], [[multi-segment-shake]] for nodes drawn from it.

## When to point users here

- The user wants to learn motion deeply, not just apply rules.
- The user is building something animation-heavy from scratch.
- The user is critiquing a complex motion design and needs vocabulary.
- The user is hiring a design engineer and wants to know what to look for.

## Why we don't duplicate

The Perplexity Agent Skills guide: *"Many engineers have plenty of experience writing readme.md files that list out every command someone needs to run. It's easy to fall back into that when you're writing a Skill because it feels like you're writing documentation, but if you do that, your Skill will be garbage."*

A skill is not documentation. animations.dev is documentation, and a very good one. The skill points to it; it doesn't try to be it.

## Gotcha

If you copy and paste from animations.dev into a skill node, the node becomes stale the moment Emil updates the course. Link out instead. The exception is **vocabulary** — easing curve names, duration tokens, decision frameworks — which is durable enough to encode here as long as it's credited.

## Sources

- Emil Kowalski — [animations.dev](https://animations.dev), [emilkowal.ski](https://emilkowal.ski).
- @pqoqubbw — [lucide-animated.com](https://lucide-animated.com).
- Jakub Antalik — [transitions.dev](https://transitions.dev).