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Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Jim Nielsen — Web developer and design thinker

Thoughtful essays on web development, design patterns, and the human side of technology.

In an age of abundance, restraint becomes the only scarce thing left, which means saying 'no' is more valuable than ever.
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blog.jim-nielsen.com

Jim writes the kind of web design blog that makes you stop and reconsider things you thought you understood. His essays explore the philosophy behind interface decisions — why buttons feel unresponsive, what it means to say "no" in product design, the difference between "easy" and "simple." It's less tutorial, more slow thinking about the craft of building for the web.

Written by Jim Nielsen since 2012.

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Personal perspectives from independent developers

Making Icon Sets Easy With Web Origami

February 23, 2026

Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG” Go back to your IDE and paste it If you’re using React or Vue, there are also npm packages you can install so you can import the icons as components. But I’m not using either of those frameworks,...

How AI Labs Proliferate

February 22, 2026

SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology as they spin out of each other. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

A Few Rambling Observations on Care

February 18, 2026

In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more I think about it, care seems antithetical to the reductive nature of quantification — “one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic”. Care considers useful, constructive systematic forces...

Unresponsive Buttons on My Fastest Hardware Ever

February 11, 2026

This is one of those small things that drives me nuts. Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible delays. Let me explain. Imagine a button that looks like this: <Button onClick={async () => { const data = await getSessionUrlFromStripe(id); window.location = data.url; } >Upgrade to Pro</Button> Fo...

A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio

February 9, 2026

I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites that’s useful for comparing icons over time. For example, here’s Keynote: (Unfortunately, the newest Keynote isn’t part of that collection because I have them linked in my data by their App Store ID and it’s not the same I...

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