CSSconf EU Blog

Meet Tammie Lister

Friday, September 18th, 2015

Portrait of Tammie Lister

Tammie works at Automattic where she makes themes for WordPress. She has a varied professional background including design, front end development, user experience, and speaking. She is a contributor to WordPress and is passionate about Open Source.

Tammie’s talk, Emotion Through CSS, will examine emotion as a powerful tool we can use to connect with users. Tammie will demonstrate why this is important and tell you how to start creating emotion through CSS and how to bring more personality to interactions.

We approached Tammie to talk to her about some of her current and future projects:

Hi Tammie! Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. Besides being busy speaking at conferences, what are you working on at the moment? I’m lucky enough to be working on two really cool projects right now. I’m one of the contributors to the new default theme for WordPress called Twenty Sixteen. My role is to commit code and make sure it meets the deadline of the next release. I’m also working on a theme pattern library. This is a really exciting project spanning most of my work this year. We at Automattic are working on creating a central pattern library for themes that has little design attached and so it can be used throughout all our themes. Added to this is a generator to ensure we output a lean base!

Are there any side projects or improvements you’re working on, or want to work on in the future? I’m trying to make time for experimenting. Side projects and doing things just because is something I try and fit in, but all too often it gets put to one side. I really want to try and work on some crossover things. Experiments in code psychology really interest me. I also want to really level up my animation skills!

Imagine that you didn’t work on the web, what would your profession be? I actually started out as an artist and studied psychology. My art forms were photography and painting. If that hadn’t worked out, then maybe I’d be a studio photographer or therapist of some form. I had a lot of potential paths before the web.

If you could teach someone new to CSS one thing, what would it be? How important it is to not use !important.

Finally, what is the one thing that you wish everyone in the audience takes away from your talk at CSSconf EU? How we can show emotion in even the smallest of details.


We’re really looking forward to meeting Tammie in just over a week! Be sure to follow her on Twitter and check out her Diary of a website.

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