Jen Simmons is an American graphic designer, web developer, educator and speaker with expertise in web standards, particularly HTML and CSS.[1][2] She is a member of the CSS Working Group and has been prominent in the deployment of CSS grid layout.[3] She worked as a developer advocate at Mozilla and later at Apple.
Life
Simmons earned a BA in sociology from Gordon College in 1991.[4] In 2007 she graduated from Temple University with an MFA in Film and Media Arts.[4] In addition to working on websites since 1998, Simmons is a designer for print pieces and live performance, including projection and lighting design work.[5]
She is a creator of Bartik theme for Drupal, which became one of core themes and a default in Drupal versions 7, 8 and 9.[6][7][8]
In 2013 she joined the Responsive Images Community Group one of groups of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).[9]
She was a designer and developer advocate at Mozilla since 2016,[10] where she designed the Firefox browser's Grid Inspector.[11][12] Since 2020, Simmons is a developer advocate at Apple for the Web Developer Experience team for WebKit and Safari.[13][10]
Simmons is a member of the CSS Working Group created by the W3C since 2016.[1][14] She joined CSS WG when working for Mozilla and continued as an Apple employee.[15][14] She helped prepare and communicate CSS grid layout specification (level 1 and 2),[16][17] CSS Containment Module Level 3,[18] CSS Cascading and Inheritance (level 5 and 6),[19][20] CSS Shapes Module Level 1.[21] She was an editor on CSS Box Sizing Module level 4[22] and on CSS Grid Layout Level 3.[23]
Significance
Simmons runs the YouTube channel "Layout Land"[24][25] and coined the term "intrinsic design" to refer to her philosophy of web layouts that mix fixed, content-sized, and fluid layout.[26] She is a frequent conference speaker at events such as South by Southwest, DrupalCon and SmashingConf.[27][28][29][30][31][32][12]
Simmons has been on Twitter since 2007 and has more than 100,000 followers.[33] In 2007, she coined the term "fail whale" for the website's error message illustration that showed during outages until 2013.[34][35][36]
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