Cindy Sang-Ching Li (September 5, 1975 – October 15, 2018) was a web designer, author, and speaker known for her expertise in

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

, user experience, and

accessibility Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design and practice of accessible development ensures both "direct access" (i. ...

. She was 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 ...

created by 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 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

. Li died of cancer at the age of 43 on October 15, 2018.

Career

Li began her design career in 1995 when she was selected to typeset the

1996 Atlanta Olympics The 1996 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXVI Olympiad, also known as Atlanta 1996 and commonly referred to as the Centennial Olympic Games) were an international multi-sport event held from July 19 to August 4, 1996, in Atlanta, ...

wall. She worked for NetChannel—an internet television startup in Norcross, GA, until it was bought out in by

AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017� ...

in 1998. Li's work at AOL included the AOLTV project, launched in 2000. She also worked on the AOL Channels: Health and Fitness, Personal Finance, Shopping, AIM Pages, AIM Lite, AOL.com,

Ficlets Ficlets was a non-commercial AOL community website dedicated to publishing and archiving ficlets, which are similar to flash fiction. It was founded on 31 October 2006 by Kevin Lawver, although it did not become fully operational until early to ...

, and Mac Development. In June 2005, Li was the designer of AOL's coverage of the Live 8. She won the first Broadband

Emmy Award The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the calendar year, each with the ...

in 2006 for her work on Live 8 on AOL. Li worked for

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

after AOL, and was the lead designer for the relaunch of Flickr for iOS in 2012. She was an author of a web design blog, several articles for net, and co-author of ''Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design'', 2nd ed.

Awards and recognitions

In 2006, Li won the Broadband Emmy Award for her work on Live 8 on AOL, the first time that a multi-city, around-the-planet event had been broadcast live through the internet without any breaks. In 2012, she was listed as one of .net magazine’s 20 Leading Web Designers.

Books and articles

* Li co-authored the second edition (2008) of ''Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design'', a guide to using

for web design using web standards(). * Li's net article ''Find the perfect colour for your website'' is a guide to using color to improve the attractiveness and usability of a website while remaining accessible. It was published in 2014.

Public speaking

Cindy Li gave opening keynotes at web design and user experience conferences, and was a frequent speaker at design and interaction conferences, most notably An Event Apart, Future of Web Design, Open Web Camp, and

South by Southwest Interactive South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and conferences organized jointly that take place in mid-March in Austin, Te ...

Other work

* Book cover designer of ''The Whuffie Factor'' *

– user interface design and programming

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Li, Cindy (designer) 1975 births 2018 deaths American bloggers American women bloggers Taiwanese bloggers Taiwanese women bloggers Women technology writers Web designers Deaths from cancer in Pennsylvania 21st-century American women writers Taiwanese emigrants to the United States