Jen Simmons is a

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

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 f ...

, educator and speaker known for her expertise in web standards, particularly

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

and

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 ...

. 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 In Cascading Style Sheets, CSS grid layout or CSS grid creates complex responsive web design grid layouts more easily and consistently across browsers. Historically, there have been other methods for controlling web page layout methods, such ...

. She worked as a developer advocate at Mozilla and later at Apple.

Life

Simmons earned a BA in

sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...

from Gordon College in 1991. In 2007 she graduated from

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then called Ba ...

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

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

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

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 current and ...

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

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

for the Web Developer Experience team for

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS ...

and

Safari A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...

. Simmons is a member of the

created by the W3C since 2016. She joined CCS 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 run 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 An Event Apart,

South by Southwest 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 Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...

, Fluent, DrupalCon, and SmashingConf. Simmons has been on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

since 2007 and has over 50 thousand followers. In 2007, she coined the term "

fail whale Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

" 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)