10 Most Influential Web Designers and Developers
The web design industry is changing quickly, and some people are raising the bar with their exceptional skills, work, and contributions to the web design community to come in the most influential web designers and developers.
Find others who are already successful at what you want to do if you want to be successful. This article is for anyone whose job revolves around websites and the internet. We’ve compiled a list of some of web design’s most influential figures, which will undoubtedly inspire you. Follow them but don’t copy them, and work hard until your name appears on the list of most.
10 Most Influential Web Designers and Developers
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is one of the internet’s most powerful figures. He is a web developer from California best known for creating WordPress, a free and open-source website software. It is a Content Management System (CMS) used by over 23% of the top ten million websites. WordPress powers over 60 million websites worldwide. In 2005, he founded Automattic, a web development company that provides free WordPress blogs and other services.
Mark Otto
Mark Otto is the creator of Bootstrap, the most widely used open-source collection of tools for developing websites and web applications. He considers himself to be a huge nerd. While working for the design firm ZURB, he designed and developed dozens of projects for small and large clients. He left ZURB in 2010 to work as a product designer at Twitter. GitHub currently employs him.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Since 2005, Jeffrey Zeldman has been blogging and publishing independent web content. In 1991, he founded Happy Cog, a popular web, and interaction design studio. He wrote the book Designing with Web Standards (published in 2001), widely regarded as having particularly impacted how we design today. Zeldman used A List Apart as an evangelical platform, demonstrating how to create search engine-friendly. These web standard websites are less expensive to build and perform better across all platforms.
Collis Ta’eed
Collis Ta’eed co-founded one of the most popular web companies, Envato, with his wife, friend, and brother. It is a collection of eight online marketplaces that sell creative stock such as graphics, themes, plugins, flash, and photography. Envato’s network includes various sites such as web galleries, design blogs, tutorial sites, and more. Across its sites, the company has paid more than $250 million to sellers.
Eric A. Meyer
Eric A. Meyer has been involved with the internet since 1993. He is well-known for his advocacy of web standards, particularly CSS, and he is the co-founder and author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, An Event Apart, and GMPG. He is currently a consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting.
Tom Preston-Werner
Tom Preston-Werner is a co-founder and former president of GitHub, a web-based hosting service for git repositories. He is the creator of the Gravatar avatar service (owned by Automattic). Preston-Werner has appeared as a guest on podcasts such as SitePoint and Rubyology, and he frequently discusses his belief that developers and designers should work together more.
Adelle Charles
Adelle Charles is a visual designer at Bitly, specializing in digital design and marketing. She co-founded Carbon Ads in 2009, which grew to reach over 20 million professionals through over 200 publishers and was later acquired by Buy Sell Ads Inc. Charles also founded the Fuel Brand Network, a network of web publications that Design Crowd acquired.
Matt Mickiewicz
Matt Mickiewicz is a well-known internet entrepreneur who co-founded Sitepoint, a popular form and marketplace for designers and developers. He also founded the web design firms 99designs, Flippa, and Hired. Matt was named one of the INC and Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneurs in 2011.
Jakob Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen has been dubbed “the king of usability,” “a pioneer in new media,” and “the smartest person on the internet.” He is a co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, which provides user experience training, consulting, and research. He founded the “Discount Usability Engineering” movement to improve user interfaces cheaply and quickly and invented numerous usability methods, including heuristic evaluation. Dr. Nielsen has 79 US patents on methods to make the internet easier to use.
Nick Finck
Nick Finck is an Amazon Web Services senior manager of user experience. He has decades of experience in web design and has worked on numerous high-profile clients’ sites. Finck was the founder and publisher of Digital Web Magazine (1996) and the co-founder of Blue Flavor, a web consultancy service (2005). He also helped to found the Information Architecture Institute and the Web Standards Project (WaSP).
