Quick Facts
Biography
Jen Simmons is a graphic designer, web developer, educator and speaker known for her expertise in web standards, particularly HTML and CSS. She is a member of the CSS Working Group created by the World Wide Web Consortium and has been prominent in the deployment of CSS grid layout. Simmons is currently a designer and developer advocate at Mozilla, where she designed the Firefox browser's Grid Inspector. 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 An Event Apart, South by Southwest, Fluent, and SmashingConf.
Simmons earned a BA in sociology from Gordon College in 1991. In 2007 she graduated from Temple University 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.
Simmons has been on Twitter since 2007 and has over 50 thousand followers. In 2007, she was the first Twitter user to coin the term "fail whale" for the website's error message illustration that showed during outages until 2013.
