Back to blogEmil Kowalski
Study the motion.
Emil is one of the best references for understanding purposeful UI animation. His work sits right between design and engineering — polished, thoughtful, but never overdone.
He currently works on the web team at Linear and has built projects like Sonner, Vaul, and animations.dev.
→ Look for: motion, micro-interactions, timing, UI details
Emil KowalskiDesign engineer working at Linear.Visit site Rauno Freiberg
Rauno’s work is a reminder that interfaces can have personality without becoming noisy.
There’s always an obsessive level of detail behind the interactions — from movement and responsiveness to the smallest visual decisions. He currently works with Vercel.
→ Look for: interaction design, tactile UI, prototyping, polish
Rauno FreibergAuthor of Interaction Guidelines at VercelVisit site Paco Coursey
Paco makes the web feel like a medium worth obsessing over.
Typography, performance, interactions, motion — everything feels considered as one experience rather than separate disciplines. He currently works on the web at Linear and previously worked on Vercel’s design system, website, and dashboard.
→ Look for: web craft, typography, frontend details, simplicity
Paco CourseyCrafting interfaces. Webmaster at Linear. Building polished software and web experiences.Visit site Gavin Nelson
Study the exploration.
What I like about Gavin’s work is how much it feels driven by iteration.
Instead of jumping straight into the final interface, his approach highlights prototyping and exploring many possibilities until the interaction feels effortless. He’s currently an interaction designer at OpenAI, after working at Linear and GitHub.
→ Look for: prototyping, product interactions, icons, experimentation
Gavin Nelson, DesignerDesigner at Open AIVisit site Lynn Fisher
Lynn shows that the web doesn’t always have to look like a product dashboard.
Her experiments push CSS, responsive design, illustration, and the browser itself into something playful and unexpected. Her portfolio even changes every year as part of that experimentation.
→ Look for: creative coding, CSS, responsive design, weird web ideas
Lynn FisherLynn Fisher is a web designer, CSS developer, and artist from Phoenix, Arizona.Visit site The Takeaway
The common thread isn’t a specific aesthetic.
It’s taste + technical ability + obsession with details.
If you’re a product designer trying to understand code, a frontend engineer trying to develop better taste, or somewhere in between — these five are worth going down the rabbit hole for.
Don’t just look at their work. Study how they think.
