Jim Nielsen

  1. Consistency, But in Excellence Not Appearance

    Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients…

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  2. Full Page Paralysis

    You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In logistics, they call it “the last mile”. It’s that final stretch that’s…

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  3. Being “Good” at Things

    Golf content on social media is my online junk food and the other day I came across a video interviewing professional golfers that asks: “What does an amateur golfer have to shoot to be considered good?” It’s a leading question because the phrasing implicitly frames a number as the answer for a qualitative…

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  4. Coding Is Designing

    Code isn’t just a way to implement a design, it’s a way to find one. With an interface, you have to use it, feel it, interact with it, and poke at it to see the relationships between things. Change X, see Y react. If it doesn’t feel right, tweak it. Change X again, now Y reacts differently. Better. Keep…

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  5. An Ode to the Exacting Pedantry of Computers

    The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?” It was such an odd concept to…

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  6. Book Notes: “Poor Charlie’s Almanack”

    I’ve been slowly listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I like his practicality. He’s never trying to be overly academic, as if he needs to prove how smart he is. He says Berkshire’s success doesn’t come from them solving hard problems, but from spending…

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  7. Something’s Rotten in the State of macOS Icon Design

    This is an iconic observation: If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design This isn’t, however, just the story of Apple’s Creator Studio icons. It’s the unfolding story of icon design across the entire macOS platform. For example…

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  8. Building Software Requires Digestion

    Here’s Scott Jenson in his insightful piece “The Ma of a New Machine”: the chatbot interface [makes us] feel like deep cognitive work is happening. But the interface is fundamentally reactive. It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum…

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  9. Out With the JS, In With the HTML

    I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions. Now I’m gonna post another example. On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re looking at. Previously, I implemented this functionality…

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  10. Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions

    I wrote about building websites with LLMs — (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(s) — and I think it’s time for a post-mortem on that approach: I like it. I’ve tweaked a few things from that original post but the underlying idea is still the same, which I would describe as: Avoid in-page interactions that…

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