Christopher Schmitt


Christopher Richard Schmitt was a web designer, author, trainer, and speaker living in Austin, TX.

Life and career

Christopher was born February 24, 1975, in Tallahassee, Florida. Developing Web sites since 1993, Christopher interned for both David Siegel and Lynda Weinman in the mid-90s while he was an undergraduate at Florida State University working on a fine arts degree with an emphasis on graphic design.
Afterward, he earned a master’s in communication for Interactive and New Communication Technologies while obtaining a graduate certificate in project management from FSU’s College of Communication.
As a member of the Web Standards Project, Schmitt co-led the Adobe Task Force and was a member of the Educational Task Force.
He was the founder of Heat Vision, a web design and new media publishing studio. Schmitt was the author of several books on standards-based web design and CSS. He gave frequent talks and trainings on standards-based web design.
He was the author of CSS Cookbook, which was named Best Web Design Book of 2006, and one of the first books that looked at CSS-enabled designs, Designing CSS Web Pages. He was also the co-author of Adapting to Web Standards, Professional CSS, Photoshop in 10 Steps or Less and Dreamweaver Design Projects and contributed four chapters to XML, HTML, and XHTML Magic. Christopher also wrote for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web and Web Reference.
In Spring 2009 he co-founded Environments for Humans, through which he chairs both physical and online conferences geared to Web design professionals.
Christopher Schmitt passed away on April 9, 2020 at his home in Austin, Texas.

Publications