Jeremy Thomas

jgthms.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2012

Jeremy Thomas, a designer and developer, makes short web design tutorials and small projects, and created the Bulma CSS framework.

What HN saysHN commenters repeatedly recommend Web Design in 4 Minutes as a way to learn simple, elegant HTML and CSS, calling it the Mona Lisa of HN.
44HN people shared it
24linked it in comments
61stories submitted
2.5Kstory points
8 months agolast shared
2012people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes
    32 people · 1.7K points · first shared 2016 · 152 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Wikipedia redesign
    3 people · 169 points · first shared 2014 · 74 comments on HN
  3. 3
    Show HN: Hacker News Dark Mode
    2 people · 119 points · first shared 2020 · 57 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Show HN: JavaScript in 14 minutes
    2 people · 38 points · first shared 2018 · 4 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Wysiwyg.css
    2 people · 9 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    The lost art of visited links
    2 people · 9 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Show HN: CSS in 44 minutes ebook
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Why HN doesn't need a redesign
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2013 · 2 comments on HN
  9. 9
    25 signs you're a professional designer
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop
    1 people · 449 points · first shared 2025 · 149 comments on HN
  11. 11
    Microsoft.com is not a website
    1 people · 11 points · first shared 2012 · 3 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Bootstrap is for programmers
    1 people · 7 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
    In CSS, set line-height first, padding second
    1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    The 2-options toggle button
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  15. 15
    Organized Gmail Inbox
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

argee · 2026-03-22
Based on TFA, nothing. Since no has quoted anything as such. So, allow me. This [0] is the Mona Lisa of Hacker News. (Most favorited post circa 2020, though now that would likely be something else.) [0] https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
Herodotus38 · 2022-09-25
I had to through my saved favorites, but I knew what you were talking about. From 5(!) years ago: https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
bbx · 2022-06-17
You might enjoy my sun/moon icon then :-) https://jgthms.com/
svat · 2021-04-08
Related/I like this: https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/ (IMO someone ought to write, if one doesn't already exist, an interactive tool that suggests recommended styling for your site one by one, and you can accept or reject each of them, then save the CSS file when you're done.) See also (it works fine in Firefox but the fonts don't seem to change in Chrome and I don't know why): https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/readable-text/index.html
leerob · 2019-04-18
I would recommend "Web Design in 4 Minutes" to understand how to use HTML/CSS to make something simple, yet elegant. https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
mushufasa · 2019-04-08
Author mentions this took a long time to arrive at. I recommend "Web Design in 4 Minutes" from the CSS guru behind Bulma: https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
zbuttram · 2016-08-31
Same here. I recommend making friends with some designers or looking around at pre-customized versions of Bootstrap. I also spent some time looking for this: http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/ One of my favorite sites for this type of conversation.
ThePhysicist · 2020-10-17
Um, what? I've been building websites since the late 90s and I absolutely disagree that there were only "minor" additions to HTML and CSS. Sure, the basic structure of HTML is unchanged, but you can't look at it without looking at CSS, as HTML just describes what to display, but now how (well there is a standard way of displaying HTML without any styling but it's not very appealing). The progress that CSS(+HTML) has made in the last 20 years is incredible: I still remember using ugly DIV tricks to get the luxury of rounded corners and shadows, which work out of the box in modern CSS. Or how hard it was to align content, which is still not super trivial but so much easier with things like flexbox and CSS grid layouts (which before also required ugly hacks like floating DIVs and clearing techniques). I think it has also never been easier to self-publish and self-host HTML websites, and no one forces you to use JS or frontend frameworks. We e.g. build all our professional websites using static HTML and we host them ourselves. For non-programmers there are tons of great tools available to visually design webpages as well. JS is also fantastic, and frameworks like React make it so much easier to write clean, good-looking web apps. I still remember the tangle of code that most websites were made of in the early 2000s, with jQuery and a dozen other frameworks mixed together and poorly bundled. Today we have a great compiler chain to which you can feed JS, (S)CSS, YAML, JSON,…
eddylt · 2014-11-25
Maybe "redesign" is too strong of the word - we're not advocating complete redesign (I'm one of the guys who collected these examples because I love HN), but HN could certainly use some improvements. Even a post "Why HN doesn't need a redesign" http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a-redesign.html features a point that "the HN Wishlist appeared on HN's front page. It unsurprisingly spawned some discussion about HN's design. The 3rd most upvoted wish is Refresh the visual design." Redesigns are great thought exercises, each of these has something interesting, that can be taken away as an inspiration if HN will start looking to change (especially some repeating UI elements). Btw the share amount of redesigns for HN online and comments on them clearly show that people are at least very interested in this subject. And it may prove the point that HN doesn't need a redesign, since so many designers see HN redesign as a major challenge to test their skill. Anyways, I enjoyed compiling this list :)
gabrielsroka · 2025-12-16
Your link is 404 (is that what you meant?) Their page uses https://jgthms.com/picknplace.js/picknplace.js
kqr2 · 2023-12-30
Somewhat ironically his https://jgthms.com/css-in-44-minutes-ebook is 404
cdbattags · 2020-06-25
Mine looks like: https://cdbattaglia.com I remember finding https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/ and being so blown away by dynamic rendered procedural CSS. I've used this as a starting point and then added features. I also have a Markdown rendering pipeline in place that allows me to display LaTex for my math studies (as seen https://cdbattaglia.com/words/axiomatic-math).
udkl · 2018-12-09
Jeremy's Web design in 4 minutes is a crash course on how to build up the different elements that go about in web design : https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
shogun21 · 2018-07-16
I think you're referring to this: https://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/
lifencoder · 2018-03-28
tantalor · 2016-07-26
While clever, there's a few problems with the navigation on this site. 1. The back button doesn't undo the changes. Abstractly, clicking on a link performs some navigation which the back button is supposed to reverse. That doesn't work here. 2. Fragment links don't work. http://jgthms.com/web-design-in-4-minutes/#centering should take me to the 3rd step. Instead it just dumps me on the first step.
cooper12 · 2016-01-15
My friend swears by Wikiwand, but I hate how it changes all links to its own domain. (It really should have been a browser extension instead of its own website that's merely a stylesheet) It also overoptimizes for the reader: minimizing the edit tab, hiding the talk page, hiding the history tab, over-enlarging images, and making disambiguation hatnotes nearly invisible. I do like how it has article preview popups on hover, though Wikipedia has had that feature in beta for a while. This blog post sums up the objection to redesigns well: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html
ykl · 2014-06-27
As with every other Wikipedia redesign proposal, linking to J. Thomas's Wikipedia Redesign post is necessary: http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html

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