Photo taken in 2024 by Max Wilkinson.
My name is Lea Verou[1] (Lea being short for Michaelia or Μιχαήλια) and I’ve had a most unusual path, albeit with a common theme: making things that make it easier for people to make things on the Web.
I work as Product Lead at Font Awesome, so my day job is making it easier to create awesome Web UIs, for everyone.
Previously, I spent a decade at MIT researching how to make web programming easier, earning me a PhD at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, with a minor in Entrepreneurship & Innovation [2]. Alas, I wanted to work on products that ship and are used by real people, not research prototypes, so academia was not for me.
The combination of my deep need to improve the usability of creator tools and my audacious refusal to take the status quo for granted led me to get involved in web standards, as a means to improve the underlying technologies that power the Web. I spent 4 years as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) member reviewing proposed web technologies for usability and architectural consistency, and documenting the emerging patterns as Web Platform Design Principles. I have also been been one of the few Invited Experts of the W3C CSS Working Group since 2012, and co-edit several CSS specifications. If you’re a Web developer, you use bits of my standards work daily.
Building tools that make web making easier is not just work — it’s a passion. As such, it has produced dozens of side projects and open source tools (I once counted over 50, though a third were either not yet released or soft launched). Perhaps the two most popular ones are:
- PrismJS, a widely used syntax highlighter with millions of weekly downloads and ~1 billion total downloads),
- Color.js, a popular color manipulation library with over 10M npm downloads
While secondary to making stuff, I love sharing knowledge (and blending the two by making educational tools). In the past, I have…
- …given over 100 invited talks at web conferences around the world,
- …written a bestselling book on advanced CSS that was translated into 8 languages and dubbed “Best CSS book”,
- …taught usability & web technologies at MIT, and co-created an MIT course combining the two that became a permanent subject
- …written several articles,
- …worked at W3C/MIT as a Developer Advocate.
In the more distant past, I grew up in Lesbos, Greece [3], and started my career at the same time as my studies, in 2005. For the first few years I freelanced across the whole spectrum, from traditional graphic design to full-stack web development. In 2008 I co-founded a startup around a set of communities which at its peak, reached nearly 1% of the country’s population as registered users. I left the company in 2011 and it was sold in 2013.
In typical ADHD fashion, I’m one of the few misfits who love (and have experience in) pretty much all aspects of product design: product design, engineering, visual design, usability, even — gasp — marketing.
You can email me at lea＠verou.me (don’t copy/paste it) if you are so inclined.
Until 2013 I officially had both my parents’ last names (Komvouti-Verou / Κομβούτη-Βέρου) though I had been going by Lea Verou for over a decade. In 2013 I finally did the paperwork to only keep my mother’s surname, for simplicity and brevity. I think it’s awesome that my parents left the choice up to me, and not the patriarchy, and I have strong opinions on last name politics. Of course, my daughter also has both my and my husband’s last names. 😊 ↩︎
The interest in business is longstanding — my undergrad alma mater was Athens University of Economics and Business. ↩︎
I used to joke that this makes me geographically Lesbian. I stopped making that joke when I realized that most people did not understand that “Lesbian” literally means “person from Lesbos” and thought I was simply making a pun. 🤦🏻 ↩︎