Thanks to all who contributed.

I also to a lot of ghost coding for other designers, which I find challenging. About 75% of my business is “sub-contracting”.

Writing ground-breaking and influential articles would be fun, but at the moment running my business successfully and raising my family take precedence.

I have to agree with Steph. I am a freelance web designer, writer, and photographer. Whild I do go to SXSW and I read/view/follow the sites of many innovators, but I am quite happy to be apart of the chorus. In my own work I am interested in good web standards design, but I am more interested in creating content and encouraging others to create content, thus I have not been actively involved in the larger design community.

I find my work enivronment is very unusual. It’s a small internet software company, with a pretty even mix of males and females. Actually, it used to be prodominately female, but the company has been expanding lately and taking in more employees. The CTO is a man, but he doesn’t do any programming. His wife (and co-owner) is a genius programmer who went to college at the age of 14 and has so much work coming her way that she barely ever sleeps. She works 7 days a week. The second highest programmer is also female. The two new programmers are male, but still manage to be brilliant. ;) I’m in charge of the web design “department” which is me and my male intern. I don’t really think my company reflects the norm of the industry. I have also slowly moved from a specific interest in web design into a heady mix of programming. I will soon be returning to college for a Bachelors in Web Development or Information Technology.

Now to stop tooting my own horn, since someone already mentioned netdiver, here’s some more…

-Melanie Groux of brushstroke.tv is inspirational
-Anna Dorfman of absolutely vile recently recoded her site in CSS.
-Sushiesque.com may be part template, but I’ve seen her previous work and know she knows all about great design.
-Danica of Applepear does amazing things with CSS
-Jody Ferry is a webdesigner with a CSS portfolio site
-My friend, Persephone, does a good job coding her site in CSS and offering various CSS skins…
-Lori at Apparently Nothing is great with minimalism
-The Ugly Green Chair is clean and gorgeous

…and others that have already been named.

I’ll try to keep my eyes open for more to add later.

Great quote! I love it!

And, as I remember right, the vast majority of the Boxes and Arrows staff/editors are women.

Tho you can take a peek at my weblog (tho it was coded a year ago, so mind some of the messiness). I use CSS and XHTML 1.0 Trans on my sister’s weblog: http://ana.lealea.net/

And I’ve seen a lot of women with blogs who prefer doing their designs through CSS and XHTML. Funnily enough, I’m more of the CSS fanatic than my boyfriend is, but I’m slowly turning his head. ;-D Results and facts speak for themselves.

P.S. I consider myself more of a designer than a “coder.” That’s what my education was, anyway. And I consider CSS and XHTML actually a nice way to marry beautiful layouts with practical, accessible websites. :D

My brief portfolio site, unfortunately, is still done archaicly (it was hastily done during portfolio grad show and while I was finishing a hectic freelance project) without XHTML or well done CSS. So please excuse! *bows*

Myself, I’ve been using CSS for a few years now, but have only very recently become interested in standards-based designing. I actually have a separate blogroll devoted to design sites that either inform or inspire me. My designs are probably too “frou-frou” though, heh. I don’t consider myself talented…yet! ;)

I work in academia and have been designing with web standards for several years now. My main contribution to the community is training the next generation of web designers, and making sure they learn good habits right off the bat. I train a team of students in CSS, web standards, and accessibility techniques.

i am also of the cult of ScriptyGoddess and Kaydeellebee.

i want to add [the girlie matters] because even though her site does not come across as visually design-y, her tech expertise puts her on a whole ‘nother level of the blogosphere.

i’ve come to standards design late in the game. i a writer who turned to DTP and eventually to web design as a way to complement my primary job. i’ve been producing personal and net art sites part-time since 1997: photoshop was 1.0 and when DW came out, we bought it for less than a hundred bucks. of course, i thought it was the best thing since sliced bread because as someone coming out of desk top publishing, DW made sense. until, that is, i started developing commercial sites. i created a site for a museum project that took me to the brink of insanity.

that’s why blogging has made me a true believer. i really think that CMS technology is the biggest innovation on the web since Mosaic and the more ubiquitous blogs become (what with Typepad, for example) the more standards site we’ll see out there.

that said, i have three sites:

culturekitchen
typepadistas
blogundanga

i have am a web standards evangelizer of sorts for the TypePad community through TypePadistas. in my search for TP sites of note, i have found many beautiful blogs designed by women that i am sure, just like me, have never thought of themselves as web designers.

on a last note: doesn’t anybody think of Mena Trott as a web designer? Her sites are truly beautiful and am sure she is reponsible in more ways than one for the blog ‘aesthetic’.

I think part of the problem is the reaction females generally get online. I’ve seen people get mobbed with posts like “omg show me the b00biez” when it’s mentioned that they’re a woman – I’d imagine that’s off-putting.

(Slashdot’s a good place to see that kind of thing)

For them, it’s probably easier to just let everyone think you’re a guy and be judged based on your work.

Funniest writer (and person) on the web, hands down! Heather’s life and background is so interesting, it would be worthwhile for someone not familiar with her to read her blog archives from the beginning one weekend :)

But some of the best work that has come out of the teams that I’ve worked with has been those teams that had both men and women working together. All male teams seemed to me to be just that little bit more boring and uncreative. Remembering this made me think that maybe I should be more aware about the person behind the blog, it can’t hurt. If my daily reads are more balanced my day may become just that little bit more fun and creative.

Of course gender never matters when evaluating a designer’s skill set — a designer can stand on the merits of talent, craftsmanship, and creativity alone, without sex, race, nationality, religion or any other extraneous factors needing to come into play. This entry was/is not intended to be a rally cry to women, nor anything about equal rights or adequate representation. It stems more from curiosity and personal interest.

I noted that many creative influences in my personal life have been women. They’ve added a balance to my view and understanding of design that I just feel I’m missing right now. So I’m simply curious to find more of them who share an interest and are doing what I currently do.

When asked for references to standards-aware designers and the sites they’ve designed, I found it odd that 90% of those I could think of were male-driven. It didn’t seem to be an accurate picture of my industry. Maybe it’s just me, and I’ve probably been looking in all the wrong places. I, personally, would like to be more aware of women designers who are doing similar things. That’s it. That’s where I thought others could help.

I’m tremendously appreciative of the referrals made so far — it’s opening my eyes to some designers and sites I may never have found otherwise.