Jen Simmons is an American

graphic designer A graphic designer is a practitioner who follows the discipline of graphic design, either within companies or organizations or independently. They are professionals in design and visual communication, with their primary focus on transforming ...

web developer A web developer is a programmer who develops World Wide Web applications using a client–server model. The applications typically use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the client, and any general-purpose programming language in the server. is used ...

, educator and speaker with expertise in web standards, particularly

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

and CSS. She is a member of the

CSS Working Group The CSS Working Group (Cascading Style Sheets Working Group) is a working group created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1997, to tackle issues that had not been addressed with CSS level 1. As of December 2022, the CSSWG had 147 membe ...

and has been prominent in the deployment of CSS grid layout. She worked as a developer advocate at Mozilla and later at Apple.

Life

Simmons earned a BA in

sociology Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...

from Gordon College in 1991. In 2007 she graduated from

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist ministe ...

with an MFA in Film and Media Arts. In addition to working on websites since 1998, Simmons is a designer for print pieces and live performance, including projection and lighting design work. She is a creator of Bartik theme for

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

, which became one of core themes and a default in Drupal versions 7, 8 and 9. In 2013 she joined the Responsive Images Community Group one of groups of the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(W3C). She was a designer and developer advocate at

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

since 2016, where she designed the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

browser's Grid Inspector. Since 2020 Simmons is a developer advocate at

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

for the Web Developer Experience team for

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine primarily used in Apple's Safari web browser, as well as all web browsers on iOS and iPadOS. WebKit is also used by the PlayStation consoles starting with the PS3, the Tizen mobile operating systems, the Amazon K ...

and

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

. Simmons is a member of the

created by the W3C since 2016. She joined CSS WG when working for Mozilla and continued as an Apple employee. She helped prepare and communicate CSS grid layout specification (level 1 and 2), CSS Containment Module Level 3, CSS Cascading and Inheritance (level 5 and 6), CSS Shapes Module Level 1. She was an editor on CSS Box Sizing Module level 4 and on CSS Grid Layout Level 3.

Significance

Simmons runs the YouTube channel "Layout Land" and coined the term "intrinsic design" to refer to her philosophy of web layouts that mix fixed, content-sized, and fluid layout. She is a frequent conference speaker at events such as

South by Southwest South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Texas. It began in 1987 and has conti ...

, DrupalCon and SmashingConf. Simmons has been on

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

since 2007 and has more than 100,000 followers. In 2007, she coined the term " fail whale" for the website's error message illustration that showed during outages until 2013.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Simmons, Jen Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Web developers Temple University alumni Gordon College (Massachusetts) alumni American graphic designers Place of birth missing (living people)