CSS Influencers

This list and the details below are not comprehensive by any means. I am very grateful to these giants for allowing us to stand on their shoulders and inspire us all to do better.

Nicole Sullivan

One of the first people I found on the internet that made me think "OMG! YES!!! She is MY PEOPLE!" is Nicole Sullivan, AKA Stubbornella. This probably would have been between 2011 and 2013 while watching JSCONF or other similar web dev conference videos on the YouTube. She talked about the issues she discovered and worked to fix at Facebook (such as "you have over 100 different variations of the color blue defined in your CSS, can you please not do that?") and they were exactly the same kind of things I dealt with on multiple projects. My projects were of a much smaller scale but code bloat and inefficiencies are problems you need to deal with before they get out of hand regardless of project size.

She went on to work with Yahoo! and do/make many more very cool things but I never followed her that closely. I credit her with creating the media object, at least in my mind she's the first one I remember seeing talk about it and defining it as a CSS/HTML concept or design pattern.

While researching her for this blog post I discovered this podcast from 2023 that I didn't know about before where she reveals she got started in carpentry before getting into web stuff. An interesting coincidence since that's something I was very into at an early age but didn't really have any support for staying on that path.

Lea Verou

Lea Verou is just on an entirely different level than anyone I know of in my field of interest here. She's an amazing designer who creates visually beautiful things as well as being a highly skilled programmer that makes "things that help people make things". An actual unicorn. I discovered her by watching various dev/design conferences on the YouTubes as well but probably a year or more later than Stubbornella.

Her talks were always impressive mixtures of fun, education, intellectual cleverness (is that even a term? I know what I mean!), and sometimes even a little bit mind-blowing... for me at least.

Harry Roberts

Harry Roberts stands out in my mind for redesigning the BBC's website. Their old code base wasn't scaling well and they had a sizeable team of developers working on the website. I'm certain I watched a talk he gave which I found so interesting that I immediately went to his website and burned his name into my memory.

Nicolas Gallagher

Nicolas Gallagher AKA necolas created the insanely popular normalize.css which was a collection of sane defaults to use as a "CSS reset". Actually calling it a reset is incorrect as resets were known for setting all kinds of CSS property:values to zero and then writing your own for everything that would work the way you wanted and be cross-browser consistent. I never liked the reset method. Resets were very heavy-handed and created more problems than they solved whereas normalizing was the (100% correct) mindset that MANY browser defaults for many CSS things were good (especially when it came to accessibility and UX issues) and should not be entirely zeroed out just because of the differences seen between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and others. Normalize.css instantly became the base I would start every project with, as well as many others like html5boilerplate, twitter bootstrap, and more.

I believe he was working for Google back when I found normalize.css, has worked for Twitter, and today he works for Meta.

Chris Coyer

Where would we be today without Chris Coyer? Certainly not in a better place. He created the CSS-Tricks website which has arguably grown into an empire of sorts compared to its humble beginnings as a simple WordPress blog run by one guy. He also helped bring CodePen to life.

Kevin Powell

Kevin Powell may or may not (in my mind) have a resume as extensive as those already listed, but his cleverness should not be underestimated. You can find him on the YouTube, as i did, helping to make the web a little bit more awesome.

Stephanie Eckles

I definitely don't know as much about Stephanie Eckles as I do most of the other names listed in this post. Has she done conference talks? Probably. Have I seen them? Probably. I'm pretty sure I took notice of her via posts on css-tricks.com and her codepens.

Her blog post on her own website about CSS calc, clamp, min, and max is something i've referenced often in the last few years.

Other Amazing Designers/Developers

I knew I was forgetting more people that have been very influential to me over the years when I was writing this post but there's nothing stopping me from adding them later!

Una Krevits = another rare unicorn.