Amber Simmons

May 26th, 2007

My name is Amber Simmons, web designer and writer in Austin, Texas.

Yes, I’m for hire. Drop me a line.

I was bored one evening in 1995 when I asked my husband, then boyfriend, to teach me HTML. Those were the good old days of the web when you could sit down with a beer and a clove cigarette and learn HTML in 30 minutes without worrying about nasty things like stylesheets or ActionScript. That’s just what we did; we opened up a text editor and a couple of amber ales and made a website. It was awful, of course. I think it had a tiling blue background, animated gifs and a lot of big, italicized text. But all of the web was awful back then. It was awesome just to be present, just to say “I have a website.”

But time wore on and I got older. I got married, had a couple of kids, and started getting serious about being heard. I’ve been a writer since I was big enough to hold a pencil, and what young writer didn’t leap at the chance to explore free-form publishing on the web? I started writing, and the web started improving, though I grudgingly admit that the former had nothing to do with the latter. I wanted to make better, prettier, more functional, more interesting websites. I was a latecomer to the CSS party, but once my eyes were opened, a whole new world of design and development opened before me. Before long I was partying with typography, dining with color theory, and schmoozing with standards. Web design started out as a means to publish my thoughts and studies; it ended up living a life of its own, one that I’m happy to be engaged in.

Today I walk a line between designer and writer that, admittedly, isn’t always clear to me. I love both and confuse the roles blithely. I get to use different pieces of my brain, rise to different challenges. I’m still learning. I’m still figuring it out. But I wouldn’t give any of it up for anything. I wake up each day knowing that my work does something meaningful for this culture and this society. And really, does it get any more awesome than that?

Technical Poet is my design studio, and welcomes inquiry about design projects, writing, editing, web communications strategy development and consulting.