Clarissa Peterson

These days, companies often look for web gurus who know how to do everything. Clarissa is one of those people who have a wide range of skills, enabling her to fill a unique role in teams, bridging the gap between designers, developers, and all the other areas that are necessary to build and maintain a strong online presence.

She usually calls herself a UX strategist, but that only tells part of the story. Starting out as a HTML developer more than a dozen years ago, Clarissa quickly discovered that websites are made up of more than code. She became interested in information architecture and content strategy early on, and soon discovered user experience design. She spent the early part of her web career working at nonprofits, where she was often the only “web person,” allowing her to get hands-on experience in every area of creating and maintaining websites, from the technical nitty-gritty to developing online strategy.

More recently, Clarissa has been focused on helping companies switch to responsive design, and helping everyone who works on websites gain a better understanding of how responsive design works.

Clarissa is the author of Learning Responsive Web Design: A Beginner's Guide, published in 2014 by O'Reilly Media. This book is a start-from-the-beginning introduction to responsive design, targeted towards designers, project managers, department heads, and others who may have trouble getting into the many more technical, developer-focused books on responsive design.